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ENGLISH LITERATURE 

DURING THE LIFETIME 

OF SHAKESPEARE 



BY 

FELIX E. SCHELLING 

Professor in the University of Pennsylvania 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1910 



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Copyright, 1910 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



Published September, igio 



R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY 
CHICAGO 



©Cf,A27]949 



■ '^* PREFACE 

The following pages attempt to tell once more, and as far 
as possible at first hand, the fascinating story of Elizabethan 
literature. But the tale has been somewhat compressed to 
treat what preceded the birth of Shakespeare with brevity, 
and what followed his death merely by indications and sug- 
gestions. This compression has seemed the more justifiable 
because Shakespeare's own work, thus contemplated in what 
surrounded it, gives to the subject a closer unity, and because 
the transition from literature, as an Elizabethan conceived and 
practised it, to what it came to be regarded in the time of 
Charles I, was well on its way by the year 1616. 

This book departs in method from the customary arrange- 
ment of material by way of annals. It has neither listed authors 
in the order of their birth nor books in the chronology of their 
publication; but it has sought to view the subject in large by 
the recognition of a succession of literary movements, develop- 
ments, and varieties in poetry, drama, and prose, at times 
identified with a great name, at others grouped merely because 
of subject-matter or likeness in origin or purpose. It is be- 
lieved that the reader can experience no greater difficulty in 
seeking for Jonson, for example, in half a dozen chapters, 
than he might undergo in an effort to trace, let us say, the 
pastoral form of poetry through the scattered annals of a score 
of poets, ordered with chronological precision. It is the 
writer's conviction that until the history of literature cuts 
loose from the tyranny of biography, as history at large has 
long since cut loose, little progress can be made toward the 
realization of the higher aims of literary study. These he 
believes to consist less in the acquisition of a mass of informa- 
tion — however desirable information may be — about books, 
authors, and borrowings, about style and the bare bones of 
plays, than in the recognition of those unseen influences, 
literary and other, by which even the greatest man becomes 

V 



vl PREFACE 

the product of his age. These higher aims he finds, too, in 
the ideals that great men have set up to write for and to live 
by, and in the nature of the artistry which, in as rnany differ- 
ing beautiful forms as the forms of nature, results from this 
finest phase of the activity of men. 

History now chronicles the common man. Literature 
should chronicle the common book, if we are to have a full 
understanding of the age. For a knowledge of the relations 
of minor authors, the quality, even the short-comings and 
inferiorities of their work, give us a mean level from which 
to judge the heights attained by choicer spirits. This book 
offers no apology for its treatment of the works of minor poets, 
dramatists, and pamphleteers where such treatment is de- 
manded for the completeness of the picture. On the other 
hand it makes no claim to exhaustiveness, as neither its plan 
nor the demands of a just proportion could support such a 
claim. 

The drama was the most potent form of Elizabethan artis- 
tic expression. It is obvious that in it Shakespeare literally 
dominated his age, as he radiated after his time a wider 
Hterary influence than that of any other English author. 
Shakespeare accordingly dominates this book, the history of 
literature in his age. For not only is the romantic drama his 
sovereign domain, but in the lyric, too, Shakespeare expressed 
the highest reach of his time. From the historical point of 
view, however, other men equally affected their fellow-sub- 
jects of Elizabeth and James. Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and 
Jonson, in poetry; Lyly, Hooker, Bacon, and the translators of 
the English Bible, in prose: these were the effective spirits of 
the time to be recognized as such not only for the divergent 
rays that each, as a lens, spread after far and wide, but for the 
converging light that each drew to himself from his predeces- 
sors, ancient, modern, foreign, or contemporary at home. 

The short quotations from Elizabethan writers that occur 
in this book have been frankly modernized; as what may be 
lost of the flavor of quaintness is more than compensated in 
ready intelligibility to the modern reader. So, too, old 
titles have been curtailed at need and rendered into modern 



PREFACE vii 

spelling, except where custom demands, as in The Faery 
Queen, for example, or The Defense of Poesy, a species of 
compromise. The Bibliography presents, in alphabetical 
arrangement, a list of authors who were writing or publish- 
ing during the lifetime of Shakespeare. It purposes to give, 
in condensed form, a representation of their literary activity 
and to indicate where their works may be read in modern avail- 
able editions. A few items of the Bibliography, such as "the 
Martin Marprelate Controversy," Character-writing, or the 
English Bible, are entered independently of any proper name. 
Cross references, as in these cases, for example, to Penry, 
Overbury, Coverdale, and others, should make these entries 
readily available in consultation. 

Tam WORTH, July, 191 o. F. E. S. 



XI 



CONTENTS 

Chapter I 

THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

England at the birth of Shakespeare, i. — Character, policy, and 
success of Elizabeth, 2. — Literature in the earlier years of her reign, 2. 
— The Renaissance in Italy and England, 4. — Tudor historical litera- 
ture in prose, 5. — The Mirror for Magistrates, 6. — Latin influences on 
English prose style, 8. — Nature of Elizabethan Latinism, 9. — The 
prose chronicles, Holinshed, lo. — Harrison's Description of England, 
II. — Rudimentary conception of history among the chroniclers, 12. — 
Shakespeare and Holinshed, 13. — Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 14. — The 
voyagers, Hakluyt, his various collections and translations, 15. — 
Purchase, the continuator of Hakluyt, and others, 17. — The Last Fight 
of the Revenge, 17-18. 

Chapter II 
LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

The gentleman of the Renaissance, 19. — Origin of modern English 
poetry in the court, Wyatt and Surrey, 20. — The limitations of their 
poetry, and their services to English versification, 21. — Gascoigne and 
his associates, 22. — Sir Philip Sidney, his life and education, 23. — 
His poetry that of the coterie, 24. — The Areopagus and its ideals, 25. 
— Sidney's - experiments in classical and Italian versification, 27. — 
His critical and poetical tenets, The Defense of Poesy, 27. — The 
poetry of Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 29. — Sidney and Lady Rich, 
30. — Sidney's alleged borrowings, 31. — Services of Sidney to English 
poetry, 32-33. 

Chapter III 

THE NEW CULTIVATED PROSE 

John Lyly, the Euphuist, his life and education, 34. — His novel 
Euphues and its success, 35. — Mistakes as to Euphues, 36. — Euphuism 
a rhetorical prose style, 37. — Its use of alliteration and other devices, 
38. — Euphuism before Lyly, North, Pettie, 39. — The fiction of Greene, 
Nash, and minor imitators of Lyly, 40. — Sidney's Arcadia, its romantic 
and poetic quality, 41. — Crowded incidents of The Arcadia, 42. — 
Its style, 43. — Services of Lyly and Sidney to English prose, 44. 

Chapter IV 

SPENSER, THE " NEW POET " 

Life and education of Edmund Spenser, 45. — His friendship with V^ 

Harvey and experiments with classical versification, 47. — The Shep- 



^ 



CONTENTS 

lendar, 48. — Its serious import and poetic quality, 49. — 

in Ireland, 50. — Colin Clout, 51. — Spenser's contemporary 

J in poetry, 52. — His marriage, 53. — His Vienxi of the Present 

of Ireland, 54. — His relations to Queen Elizabeth, 55. — His un- 

.ely death, 55. — The Faery Queen, its general design, 56. — Its poetic 

.rt, 58. — Its allegory, 59. — The Spenserian stanza, 60. — The paradox 

of Spenser's genius, 61-62. 

Chapter V 

LYLY AND THE DRAMA AT COURT 

Elements of the drama in earlier Tudor times, 63. — The first 
regular plays and the classical influences on them, 64. — Influence of 
the court on the drama, 66. — The boy companies and other Eliza- 
bethan actors, 67. — The choirmaster as theatrical manager, 68. — Lyly's 
traffic with the stage, 69. — His comedies, 70. — His Endimion, its occa- 
sional and allegorical character, 71. — ^Peele and his Arraignment of 
Paris, 73. — Presentation of court plays, 76. — Settings of a private 
theater, 78. — The theater in Blackfriars, 78. — ^Lyly and his influence 
as a dramatist, 79. 

Chapter VI 

MARLOWE AND HIS FELLOWS IN THE POPULAR DRAMA 

Origin of the professional player, 80. — Early companies, 81. — 
Shakespeare's company and his relation to it, 81. — Elizabethan play- 
houses and their sites, 82. — Structure of the Elizabethan playhouse, 
84. — Settings, scenery, and properties, 85. — The playhouse and the 
city fathers, 87. — Repute and standing of players, 88. — Pre-Shake- 
spearean plays on the common stage, 89. — The classics, Italian story, 
and actual life the three mainsprings of Elizabethan drama, 90. — 
The work of Peele for the popular stage, 90. — ^Robert Greene and 
his work in the drama, 91. — Thomas Kyd, his Spanish Tragedy and 
other plays, 93. — Christopher Marlowe, his Tamburlaine, and his 
consciousness of his dramatic departure, 93. — Faustus, and other 
dramas of Marlowe, 97. — Services of Kyd and Marlowe to the new 
romantic drama, loo. — Alleyn, Burbage, Shakespeare, and the sub- 
stantial returns of dramatic success, loi. 

/ 

Chapter VII \ 

THE PAMPHLET AND THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

London and the Elizabethan reading public, 102. — Diversity and 
popularity of the pamphlet, 103. — Its character as incipient journal- 
ism, 104. — The pamphleteer. Churchyard, 105. — Breton, his ephemeral 
verse and prose, io6. — Samuel Rowlands, 107. — Greene as a pamphle- 
teer, and writer of fiction, 107. — His conycatching pamphlets, 109. — 
His autobiographical confessions, no. — Lodge's Rosalynd and other 
stories, no. — The Nash-Harvey pamphlet war, in. — The Marprelate 
controversy, 113. — The part of Lyly, Nash, and Bacon in it, 113. — 
Nash's Jack Wilton, 115. — The idiomatic qualities of the prose of 
Nash, his vigor, satire, and humor, n6. — Dekker as a pamphleteer, 
117. — Occasional worth and eloquence of the pamphleteers, 119-120. 



CONTENTS / xi 



Chapter VIII 

THE PASTORAL LYRIC AND THE SONNET 

Nature and place of the Elizabethan lyric, 120. — Origin of the 
English lyric of art with Wyatt and Surrey, 121. — Earlier miscellanies 
of lyrical poetry, 121. — ^The pastoral_d£cade,_i22. — England's Helicon, 
123. — The lyrics of Greville and Southwell, 125. — Barnes, Watson, 
and the Italianists, 126. — The conventional " conceit," 127. — The 
decade of the sonnet, 128. — Daniel and Constable, 129. — French in- 
fluence on the sonneteers, 130. — The sonnet craze at its height, 130. 
— The form of the sonnet, 131. — Varieties of the Elizabethan sonnet, 
131. — Spiritual sonnets, 132. — The occasional sonnet, 133. — "Conceits" 
in the sonnet, 134. — End of the sonnet craze, 135. — The lyrical poetry 
of Raleigh, 136. — Drayton's sonnets, 137. — Spenser's Amoretti, their 
subjective significance, 139. — Shakespeare and his patrons, 141. — ^The 
Sonnets of Shakespeare, 142. — Autobiographical and other interpreta- 
tions of them, 144. — ^Their defects and superlative merits, 146-147. 



Chapter IX 

SHAKESPEARE IN COMEDY AND IN CHRONICLE HISTORY 

Known events in the life of Shakespeare, 148. — His education and 
natural endowments, 159. — His choice of the stage as a profession 
and early success, 153. — His earliest work, its imitative character, 
153. — Influence of Lyly on Shakespeare, 154. — Experimental comedies, 
155. — The Merchant of Venice, 156. — A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 
157. — The Henry VI trilogy, 158. — Greene's envious allusion to 
Shakespeare, 159. — Shakespeare's two Richards and Marlowe's 
Ediuard II, 160. — Height of the chronicle play in Henry IV, 161. — 
Chronicle plays by other hands, 163. — Plays on mythical British his- 
tory, 163. — Meres' recognition of the character and standing of Shake- 
speare, 164. — Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, 164. — 
All's Well and Measure for Measure, 166. — The problematic nature 
of Troilus and Cressida, 167. — Shakespeare and King James, 168. 
— The orderly growth of Shakespeare's genius, 169-171. 



Chapter X 

"' VERNACULAR DRAMA OF DEKKER, HEYWOOD, AND 
MIDDLETON 

Dekker as a dramatist, 172. — His Old Fortunatus, 173. — His Shoe- 
makers' Holiday and other comedies, 174. — His dramatic portraiture, 
176. — Thomas Heywood, 178. — The number and variety of his plays, 
A Woman Killed nuith Kindness, 180. — Improvidence of the lives of 
Heywood and Dekker, 181. — ^Philip Henslowe and his Diary, 182. — 
The theatrical business in his time, 183. — Arden of Feversham and 
other murder plays, 184. — Realism of the bourgeois drama, 185. — 
Middleton and his comedies of London life, 186. — His collaboration 
with Rowley and others, his imitators, 187. — Romantic plays of 
Middleton and Rowley, 188. — A Fair Quarrel, 189. — Middleton as a 
dramatist, 190. 



xu CONTENTS f 

I 
I 
Chapter XI ^ 

LATER ANTHOLOGIES AND LYRICS TO BE SET TO MUSIC 

Early miscellanies of poetry, 191. — Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 
192. — Elizabethan music, 192. — The Elizabethan song-book, 194. — The 
madrigal, 195. — Poets of the song-books, 196. — Dowland, Morley, and 
other Elizabethan musicians, 198. — Thomas Campion, 199. — His metri- 
cal felicity, 200. — Songs of the drama, 201. — Dekker, Nash, and other 
contemporaries of Shakespeare, 202. — ^The songs of Shakespeare, 203. 
— Metrical variety and adequacy of the song-writers, 204. — Folk-lore 
and balladry as sources of Elizabethan songs, 205. — Fletcher and 
Jonson as writers of songs, 206. — Heywood's songs and Webster's, 208. 

Chapter XII v 

EPIC, NARRATIVE, AND PASTORAL VERSE 

Elizabethan epic verse, 209. — The historical epics of Daniel and 
Drayton, 211. — Life and literary activity of Drayton, 212. — Warner 
and other writers of historical verse, 213. — Erotic narrative verse, 
214. — Marlowe's Hero and Leander, 215. — Venus and Adonis and 
Lucrece, 216. — Lodge, Marston, and others in like verse, 217. — Sir John 
Davies and his poetry, 218. — The political verse of Greville and 
Daniel's Musophilus, 219. — Drayton's Polyolbion, 220. — The Spen- 
serians, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, 221. — Elizabethan eclogues and 
pastorals, 223. — William Browne as a pastoral poet, 225. — The pas- 
toral ideal, 227-228. 

Chapter XIII 

JONSON AND THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

Life of Jonson, 229. — Every Man in His Humor and the Jonsonian 
theory of "humors," 230. — Its popularity and imitators, 231. — Jonson 
and the war of the theaters, 232. — Satire on the Elizabethan stage, 
233. — Personal allusions in Every Man Out of His Humor and other 
plays, 234. — Poetaster and Dekker's reply, Satiromastix, 236. — Shake- 
speare and the "war," 238. — The allusion in Hamlet to the "war," 
239. — Senecan and other plays on Roman history, 240. — Shakespeare's 
Julius CcBsar, 240. — ^Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline, 241. — Jonson's 
collaboration in Eastvuard Hoe, 242. — Volpone and Jonson's larger 
views of comedy, 243. — The Alchemist and other comedies of London 
scene, 244. — The last plays of Jonson, 244. — The non-dramatic poetry 
of Jonson, 245. — Its classicality and sense of finish, 246. — Jonson's 
catholicity of taste, 248. — His unparalleled influence on the trend of 
English literature, 249. 

Chapter XIV 

SHAKESPEARE, WEBSTER, AND THE HEYDAY OF 
ROMANTIC TRAGEDY 

Range and variety of Elizabethan tragedy, 250. — Seneca and 
English tragedy, 250. — Influence of Kyd and Marlowe on Shakespeare, 
251. — Romeo and Juliet^ 252. — Shakespeare, Jonson, and others in plays 
on classical story, 253. — Antony and Cleopatra, 255. — Marlowe and 



CONTENTS xiil 

Chapman in tragedy on modern foreign history, 255. — Other dramas 
of this type, 257. — The tragedy of revenge, a revival of Kyd by 
Marston, 257. — Hamlet's place in this group, 258. — Chettle's and 
Tourneur's tragedies of revenge, 259. — Tragedies of perverted woman- 
hood, 260. — Webster, his IVhite Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and 
other plays, 261. — Shakespeare's Othello, the master tragedy of jeal- 
ousy, 264. — Kinff Lear, Macbeth, 265. — The tragic art of Shakespeare, 
266. — Its growth and development, 267. — Shifting of Shakespeare's 
point of view with advancing life, 269. — General qualities of Eliza- 
bethan tragedy and of Shakespeare's, 269. — Shakespeare's attitude 
towards women, 270-271. 

Chapter XV 

TRANSLATION IN VERSE AND PROSE 

Elizabethan interest in foreign literatures, 272. — Range and di- 
versity of Elizabethan translation, 273. — Translations of the classics, 
274. — Life and education of George Chapman, 274. — His translation 
of Homer, 275. — North's Plutarch, Holland as a translator, 278. — 
Translations from the Italian, Harington's Orlando, 280. — Painter's 
Palace of Pleasure and other like collections of Italian tales, 281. — 
Use of these as sources for drama, 283. — Other works translated, 284. 
— Translations from the Spanish, 284. — Shelton's Don Quixote, 285. — 
Translations from the French, 285. — Florio's Montaigne, 286. — Trans- 
lation of the English Bible, 286. — Tyndale and the Bible, 287. — 
Coverdale and the Great Bible, 288. — The Bishops' and other Bibles, 
289. — The Authorized Version of the Bible, 290-201. 

Chapter XVI 

HISTORY, DIVINITY, AND OTHER PROSE OF CONTEMPO- 
RARY COMMENT 

Elizabethan conception of history, 292. — William Camden and his 
works, 292. — The Histories of England of Hayward, Speed, and 
Daniel, 293. — Histories of foreign countries, Grimestone and Knolles, 
294. — Raleigh and his History of the World, 295. — Antiquarian writ- 
ings, Stow's Survey of London, 297. — Sir Henry Wotton and his 
literary projects, 298. — Educational works, state documents, and minor 
prose writings, 299. — Reginald Scott's Discovery of Witchcraft and 
the literary works of King James, 301. — Books of travel, Moryson's 
Itinerary, Coryate, Lithgow, and Sandys, 302. — Greville's Life of 
Sidney, 304. — Jonson's Discoveries, 305. — Theological and controver- 
sial writings, 306. — Calvin and the Puritan ideal of church and 
state, 308. — Richard Hooker, his life and personality, 309. — The Lavas 
of Ecclesiastical Polity, 311. — Its service to the Established Church, 
its limitations and style, 312. — ^Donne's Sermons and the Contempla- 
tions of Hall, 314. — Minor theologians and pulpiters, 315. 



Chapter XVII 



J. 



ELIZABETHAN SATIRE, THE EPIGRAM, AND THE 
" CHARACTER " 

Nature and form of satire, 316. — The Roman satirists in their 
influence on English satire, 317. — Wyatt the earliest English imitator 



xiv CONTENTS 

of classical satire, 318. — Hake and Gascoigne, 319. — The Satires of 
Donne, 319. — Those of Lodge, 321. — The satires of Hall, 322. — 
Obscurity in poetry, 323. — The satires of Marston, 324. — Suppression 
of satirical writings by ecclesiastical authority, 326. — Elizabethan epi- 
grams, 326. — Epigrams of the reign of James, 327. — Jonson as an 
epigrammatist, 328. — Irregular satire in prose, pamphlets, and broad- 
sides, 329. — Puritan attacks on social abuses, Stubb's Anatomy of 
Abuse, 330. — ^The " Character," its origin and forerunners, 331. — The 
Characters of Hall, 332. — Sir Thomas Overbury, his tragic death, 333. 
— His Characters, 334.— Breton's imitations of the character and the 
essay, 335. — Minor character-writing, 336. 



Chapter XVIII 

BACON, JURIST, PHILOSOPHER, AND ESSAYIST 

Life of Francis Bacon, 337. — His friendship with Essex and enmity 
with Coke, 338. — ^Bacon and Elizabeth, 339. — His conduct towards 
Essex, 340. — His honors in the reign of James, 340. — His disgrace, 341. 
— The Advancement of Learning, 342. — The Great Instauration, 343. 
— The Baconian induction, 344. — His place as a philosopher, 345. — 
His literary work, the Essays, 346. — Their masterly style and worldly 
wisdom, 347. — Variety of Bacon's literary style, 349. — Bacon's mistrust 
of English, 350. — His interest in masques his only touch with the 
drama, 350. — The verse of Bacon, its mediocrity and pessimism, 351. 
— Shakespeare and Bacon, 354-356. 

Chapter XIX 

DONNE AND HIS PLACE AMONG LYRICAL POETS 

The life and education of John Donne, 357. — His early poetry, 
its realism, 359. — His secular lyrical poetry, 360. — His scholarship, 
the vogue of his poetry and his careless attitude towards it, 361. — 
His romantic marriage, 361. — Years of poverty and depression, Bia- 
thanatos, controversial writings, 363. — Mistakes about Donne, "The 
metaphysical school," 364. — Qualities of the poetry of Donne, 365. — 
The freedom of his versification and elaboration of his stanza, 366. 
— The abstraction of his ideas and originality of his thought and 
style, 367. — His use of conceit, 368. — Influence of Donne on later 
poets, 371. — William Drummond, his life and reading, 373. — His 
poetry, 374. — His occasional verse and others works, 375. — The posi- 
tion of Donne among lyrical poets, 376-377. 



Chapter XX 

DRAMA AT THE UNIVERSITIES, THE PASTORAL DRAMA, 
AND THE MASQUE 

Early performance of plays at schools and at the universities, 377. 
— The Parnassus trilogy at Oxford, 379. — Academic estimates of 
Shakespeare and Jonson, 381. — Allegorical college plays, Lingua, 381. 
— Prevalence at the universities of dramatic entertainments, 382. — 
Latin tragedies and comedies, 383. — Ignoramus and King James' ap- 



CONTENTS XV 

preciatlon of it, 384. — Nature of pastoral drama, 384. — The pastoral 
element in earlier Elizabethan comedies, 385. — ^Jonson and Shake- 
speare, and the pastoral, 385. — The true pastoral drama, Daniel's 
Queen's Arcadia, 386. — Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, 388. — Other 
minor pastoral dramas, 389. — ^Antiquity of masquing, 391. — ^The 
masque defined, 391. — Daniel's masques and others', 393. — ^The pre- 
eminence of Jonson as a writer of masques, 393. — His development 
of the antimasque, 394. — Masques on the occasion of the marriage 
of the Princess Elizabeth, 395. — Allegory and classical reference of 
the Jacobean masque, 396. — Other contemporary pageantry, 396. — 
Masques in the plays of Shakespeare and others, 397-398. 



Chapter XXI 
SHAKESPEARE AND THE NEW DRAMA OF FLETCHER 

Chronology of the dramatic authors of Shakespeare's time, 399. — 
Tragicomedy, 400. — The life of John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, 
400. — Their collaboration in the writing of plays, 402. — Criteria 
of contrast in their work and in that of Massinger, 403. — Change 
in the popular dramatic taste, in the earlier years of James, 404. — 
Philaster the typical tragicomedy, 405. — Other plays of the type, 406. 
— The " dramatic romances " of Shakespeare, their contrasts with 
the tragicomedy of Fletcher, 407. — Pericles, 408. — Cymbeline and The 
Winter's Tale, 409. — The Tempest, 411. — The romances of Shake- 
speare unmarked by any deterioration in art, 412. — Later years of 
Shakespeare, 413. — His probable association with Fletcher in Henry 
VIII and The Tivo Noble Kinsmen, 414. — Fletcher's comedies of man- 
ners, 415— His romantic plays and their levy on Spanish sources, 416. 
— The Maid's Tragedy, Bonduca, and other serious plays of Fletcher, 
417. — Fletcher the completest of English dramatists, 419. 

England and literature at the death of Shakespeare, 421. — New 
books of the time and old ones reprinted, 422. — ^Relative popularity 
of the dramatists and other authors as witnessed by the contempo- 
rary demand for their printed works, 424. — The acknowledged pre- 
eminence of Shakespeare, 425. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY, 427. 
INDEX, 460. 



ENGLISH LITERATURE DURING THE 
LIFETIME OF SHAKESPEARE 

I 

CHAPTER I 
THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

WHEN Shakespeare was born, in the year 1564, Eliza- 
beth had been on her throne for six years and had 
already gained, by the steadiness of her conduct and the 
wisdom of her counsels, the loyal affections and support of 
her people. King Henry's reign towards its close had de- 
generated into a reign of terror; and incompetency ruled 
throughout the government of the child Edward. More recent 
had been the bloody reprisals of unhappy and bigoted Queen 
Mary in her misguided endeavors to restore officially to her 
country the supplanted older faith. England had swung in 
these three reigns from Rome to Geneva, and from Geneva 
back to Rome, impelled by the fiat of monarchs and not by 
popular revulsions of behef. But these things were now 
memories of the past. What neither the example of Lutheran 
Germany nor the despotic will of Henry could effect, the fires 
of Smithfield had accomplished. England was at last become, 
if not wholly Protestant, at least once and forever hostile to 
the pretensions of Rome; and the menace of an ill-assorted 
union of England with Spain, the danger that England might 
sink, like the Netherlands, into a mere province of the uni- 
versal Spanish dominion, had vanished with the resolute 
refusal of Elizabeth to accept the hand of King Philip. 

In 1564 Queen Elizabeth was thirty-one years of age, a 
capable and imperious sovereign, skilled in the tortuous 
diplomacy of the age, unerring in her power to discern and 
employ men competent for the task of government, and 



2 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

devoted with the whole strength of her keen intellectual 
nature to the welfare of England. The queen's subjects at 
large knew little of her niggardliness in money affairs, of her 
want of religious conviction, or the doubles and turns of the 
royal policy in its frequently short-sighted opportunism; but 
her immediate servants had learned that even by devious 
courses and without the stay of a strong moral principle, 
Elizabeth might be trusted to steer a course safe and true 
among the quicksands of international intrigue; and in their 
trust was begotten the larger trust of the nation. Elizabeth 
had acquiesced in the accomplished fact of the French recovery 
of Calais; but she wrested from Francis and Mary Stuart, a 
year or two later, the withdrawal of the French garrison from 
the Scottish town of Leith and the acknowledgment that 
the realms of England and Ireland appertained of right to 
her. Elizabeth failed to obtain the papal recognition of her 
legitimacy and her right to succeed to the crown; but she 
curbed the reactionary zeal of her sister's clergy as she held 
in leash the violence of expectant Protestantism, and in the 
chaos of the religious uncertainty of the first few years of her 
reign achieved the foundations of a toleration of opinion, if 
not of worship, which the other European countries of her 
age knew not. Moreover Elizabeth was committed now, 
once and for all, to the policy of her father by the passing of the 
act of royal supremacy in the church, by her restoration of the 
prayer-book, and by her decisive refusal either to admit a 
papal nuncio into her realm or to send an envoy to the Coun- 
cil of Trent. 

It is difficult to realize the poverty of English literature 
in the first years of Elizabeth's reign and appreciate how little 
the age had advanced, despite the new learning, towards the 
flowering time that was so near at hand. Aside from ser- 
mons, controversial pamphlets, and chronicle histories, the 
chief books reprinted in these years were Elyot's Governor, 
the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, now turned into English, 
and the Colloquies of Erasmus. In poetry the Songs and 
Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt 
and Others, popularly known as TotteVs Miscellany, attained 



LITERATURE IN 1564 3 

a third edition by the year of the accession of the queen; 
and the notable, if lugubrious, collection of historical "com- 
plaints," The Mirror for Magistrates, a second in 1563. 
Other poetry there was little, if we except Tusser's easy rimes 
on The Hundreth Good Points of Husbandry, Churchyard's 
"flyting," as the Scotch call such literary squabbling, with 
one "Camell," and the Eclogues of Barnabe Googe. In the 
drama as little had appeared. An interlude or so of John 
Heywood, Lusty Juventus, The Nice Wanton, and Thersites, 
these were nearly all. Perhaps the Diccon of Bedlam of the 
Stationers' Register of 1563 was Gammer Gurtons Needle, 
though of this we can not be sure. But an interest in poetry 
was awakening. Chaucer's complete works, Lydgate's 
Siege of Thebes and Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman, all 
were reprinted in 1 561; and the works of John He)Awood 
appeared collected in the following year. The ancients, too, 
were now translated into English. Besides Surrey's earlier 
attempts of 1557, Phaer's translation of Vergil's Mneid came 
two years later, carried on to nine books by 1562; while 
Jasper Heywood and Alexander Nevile set forth four of the 
Senecan tragedies in English, and Nicholas Udall, the well 
known author of Ralph Roister Doister (long since written 
but not yet printed), "newly corrected" his Publius Teren- 
tius. Flowers of Latin Speaking. Translations in part of 
Sallust, Cicero, Plutarch, Quintius Curtius, Cato, and Caesar 
were printed within these few years, and Guevara's popular 
Golden Book, Castiglione's Courtier, and Macchiavelli's Art 
of War y^&ie. Englished for the unlettered. More suggestive 
of what was to come was the translation of two Italian stories, 
Titus and Gisippus and Romeus and Juliet, both shortly to be 
employed as subjects for drama; while the beginnings of 
that deep interest in everything Italian that characterizes 
Elizabethan literature at large are disclosed in the informing 
works of William Thomas, his History of Italy, his Italian 
Grammar, and Dictionary of that language. 

The mental awakening of England, which some still dare 
to call the Renaissance, and the similar earlier awakening 
in Italy offer two marked contrasts: a difference in character 



4 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

and a difference in the tardiness with which that movement 
proceeded to its results in the northern country. In Italy 
the Renaissance had been for the most part unmoral, and the 
highest aesthetic perception and scholarly tastes had often 
existed in men whose lives were marked by moral obliquity 
and blackened with crime. There the pleasures of the world's 
newly stirred curiosity were largely the virtuoso's delight in 
profane learning. When this reached deeper, it stimulated 
the frank philosophical cynicism of Macchiavelli's Prince, or 
raised ideals of the perfect man living in society as depicted 
in The Courtier. In Italy, the new world which the study of 
the ancients had opened to the spirit of man reacted imme- 
diately and mainly on literature, art, and society. In England, 
on the contrary, the new learning, as it was there called, took 
on from the first a more practical and a more ethical turn 
The attitude of such men as Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, 
and those who brought the study of Greek to England was 
notable for its moral tone. The new knowledge was to be 
studied as a means to the better understanding of man in his 
relations to man and in his obligations to God. This was 
wide of the virtuoso's pleasures in the beauties of ancient 
classical art and the niceties of ancient classical learning; 
and hence it was a long time in England before the spirit of 
the new learning was felt to the full in works of art. In a 
word, although the bud was swelling and ready to burst about 
the time that Shakespeare was born, the flower of the Renais- 
sance came into bloom only after Queen Elizabeth had been 
on her throne for a generation. The poetical activities of 
Sidney and of Spenser begin, at earliest, in the late seventies, 
and Lyly's Euphues appeared in 1579. It is doubtful if 
Marlowe, much less Shakespeare, wrote anything permanent 
before 1586; and Hooker and Bacon first emerge from con- 
troversy into authorship in the nineties. It is true that certain 
qualities which came to distinguish Elizabethan poetry are 
discoverable in Wyatt and Surrey, both of whom died while 
Henry VIII was yet reigning, and it is equally certain that 
men like Roger Ascham, the famous tutor to the children of 
that sovereign, and Latimer, one of the most eloquently out- 



fi 



TUDOR HISTORICAL LITERATURE 5 

spoken of Henry's preachers, presaged, in form as well as in 
matter, certain abiding characteristics of Elizabethan prose. 
Nevertheless, it is the fruit and not the flower of promise that 
we gather in the harvest; and little has the student of English 
poetry or English prose to lose (if we except some half-dozen 
books, all of them already mentioned), who begins his study 
of Elizabethan literature with the works which appeared, in 
print at least, at a time subsequent to the birth of Shakespeare. 

It is a commonplace of English history that the vigilant 
and centralized monarchy of Henry VII fostered in English- 
men a sense of nationality to which they had become almost 
complete strangers during the long feuds of the Wars of the 
Roses. The national consciousness, once reawakened, waxed 
strong in the earlier days of Henry VIII; and, though sub- 
mitted to a terrible ordeal in the political and religious per- 
secutions that followed, answered with enthusiasm the appeals 
of Elizabeth to patriotism and rested firm in its appreciation 
of her good government at home and her success in foreign 
politics. Literature responded at once to this awakened 
national spirit in a renewed interest in the past evinced in the 
translation and republication, for example, of such history as 
Ralph Higden's Polychronicon and in a revival of the popu- 
larity of works like Lydgate's Falls of Princes and Malory's 
Morte Darthur in which the historical instinct vies with the 
love of romance. A little later came the heyday of the Eng- 
lish chronicle history which flourished in prose, in verse, at 
large and in epitome, in collections and in separate tracts, 
poems, and dramas. Sidney died too early to have felt to the 
full the literary reflex of this revival of national spirit. But 
it was this spirit no less than the love of poetry which inspired 
a fam.iliar passage of The Defense of Poesy, which quotation 
can never stale: "Certainly I must confess my own barbar- 
ousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas 
that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet: 
and yet is it sung but by some blind crouder with no rougher 
voice than rude style." 

The amount and variety of the literature of the sixteenth 
century which took English historical and legendary themes 



6 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

for its subject-matter are things commonly forgotten. This 
Hterature began towards the end of the reign of Henry VHI 
with Grafton's printing and continuation of the metrical 
chronicle of Hardyng and his edition of Hall. In the two 
succeeding reigns such books were discouraged; Gardiner 
even discerned concealed heresy in the political examples of 
The Mirror for Magistrates, and the projected publication of 
that work, in 1555, was stayed. On the accession of Eliza- 
beth the publication of historical literature began anew with 
a third edition of the Chronicle of Fabyan. In 1563 Grafton 
brought out An Abridgment of the Chroncicles of England 
which attained a fourth edition in 1572. He was rivaled in 
this undertaking by John Stow in 1565 with A Summary of 
English Chronicles which ran through ten editions up to 1604 
and was the accepted short history of England of its day. 
Before a decade had elapsed John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, 
first published in 1563 and popularly known as The Book of 
Martyrs, had gone into a second edition; Grafton had abridged 
his Abridgment which still stretched, however, "from the 
creation of the world to the year 1566," and extended it into 
his Chronicle at Large and Mere History of the Affairs of 
England and the Kings of the Same, 1 569; while Stow, in 
association with Bishop Parker, brought to the press three 
earlier Latin chroniclers, Matthew of Westminster, Matthew 
of Paris, and Thomas of Walsingham, and was busily at work 
in gathering materials for his Chronicles of England, 1580, 
and his Annals, first printed in 1592. In 1577 was pub- 
lished the most important of Elizabethan prose histories, 
The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, by Ralph 
Holinshed, a second edition appearing under the title, 
Chronicles of England from William the Conqueror, in 1587. 
To this enumeration of chronicles may be added the scattered 
biographies of historical personages from The Life of Cardinal 
Wolsey by Cavendish, written in the reign of Mary, and Sir 
John Hayward's several lives of English kings, to Bacon's 
Life of Henry VH, dating late in the reign of King James. 

Nor was the prevalent interest in English history less not- 
able among the poets whose flights, if by no means so sustained 



"THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES" 7 

as those of the chroniclers, were far more frequent. The Mir- 
ror for Magistrates was one of the earHest fruits of the EHza- 
bethan press. It is commonly spoken of as projected by Sir 
Thomas Sackville, one of the authors of GorboJuc, though he 
was really no more than the contributor of the one "legend," 
that of the Duke of Buckingham, which reached a real poetic 
level on a plane of mediocrity. The work was originally under- 
taken in consequence of the revived popularity of Lydgate's 
Falls of Princes. This origin gives to The Mirror for Magis- 
trates a medievalism of tone which is enhanced by the sameness 
of mood, the moralizing, the somewhat old-fashioned versi- 
fication of the majority of the "legends," and their connection 
by an artificial thread. The Mirror was a growth and accre- 
tion. The nineteen "legends" which constitute the first 
edition, that of 1559, are the work of six writers, of whom 
William Baldwin is the chief. They concern events from the 
days of the two Roger Mortimers and Thomas of Woodstock 
(1329-1392) to the tragedy of George, Duke of Clarence 
(1478). The second edition, 1563, reprinted these "leg- 
ends," and added eight more by several authors, three of whom 
had already contributed to the first. Nearly all these "le- 
gends " concern personages of the time of Richard III. In 
1574, John Higgins added seventeen "legends" of mythical 
and Roman Britain; and, as they preceded the other stories 
in point of time, called the new book The First Part of the 
Mirror for Magistrates. Four years later a rival continuation 
called The Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates "con- 
taining the Fall of the unfortunate Princes of this Land from 
the Conquest of Caesar unto the coming of Duke William the 
Conqueror" was published, the work of Thomas Blenner- 
hasset, Baldwin's work thus becoming the third part. Blen- 
nerhasset's collection contains twelve "legends." In 1587 
Higgins added to his "first part" no less than twenty-three 
stories, into which several Roman emperors intrude with a 
few further tales of modern personages by Churchyard and 
others. The last edition of The Mirror, 16 10, picks and 
chooses from the earlier ones and adds eleven "legends," one 
by Drayton, the rest by the editor, Richard Niccols. We have 



8 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

thus a corpus of nearly a hundred "legends" varying in length 
from fifty to four hundred lines each, the work of some fifteen 
authors, extending over a period of fifty years and appearing 
in eight issues. We shall defer inquiring into the historical 
epics of Daniel, Drayton, and Warner to a later place in this 
book. All were of this general type. This impetus towards 
historical writing continued far into the reign of King James j 
although it was in the more patriotic times of Elizabeth that 
it reached its height and begot in the English drama that pecu- 
liarly typical and effective group of plays which is known as 
the English chronicle histories.^ 

Turning more specifically to the early prose chronicles, 
it is to be remembered that the learned in Tudor days still 
looked askant upon any work of a solid nature written in the 
vernacular prose. The sanction of centuries of scholarship 
demanded the use of the learned tongue, and when men came 
to cast their thoughts into English, it was with apologies for 
such a departure from custom and wont. For example it is 
thus that the learned Ascham writes in 1545: 

And although to have written this book either in Latin or Greek 
had been more easier and fit for my trade in study, yet nevertheless, 
I supposing it no point of honesty, that my commodity should stop 
and hinder any part either of the pleasure or profit of many, have 
written this English matter in the English tongue for English men. 

Elsewhere Ascham makes clear the condition of the time : 

And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently 
done in them, that none can do better. In the English tongue, con- 
trary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and 
handling, that no man can do worse. For therein the least learned 
for the most part, have been always most ready to write. And they 
which had least hope in Latin, have been most bold in English; when 
surely every man that is most ready to talk, is not most able to write. 

These passages of Ascham present by no means the biased 
and prejudiced opinion of a scholar who failed to appreciate 
the work of his own age in dwelling in the past. As a matter 
of fact, few of the familiar books of the modern world were 

^ The foregoing three paragraphs are repeated in part from the 
author's English Chronicle Play, 1 902. 



LATIN EXAMPLE AND ENGLISH PROSE 9 

in existence when Ascham wrote. As Macaulay put it: "In 
the time of Henry VIII and Edward VI, a person who did not 
read Greek and Latin could read nothing, or next to nothing. 
The Italian was the only modern language which possessed 
anything that could be called a literature. All the valuable 
books then extant in all the vernacular dialects of Europe 
would hardly have filled a single shelf. England did not yet 
possess Shakespeare's plays and The Faery Queen, nor France 
Montaigne's Essays, nor Spain Don Quixote; .... Chau- 
cer, Gower, Froissart, Comines, Rabelais nearly complete the 
Hst." 

It was in the nature of things, then, that books so thor- 
oughly national as those which discoursed of English deeds 
and English heroes should be cast in the English mold. Sir 
Thomas More might write in Latin of his imaginary common- 
wealth in Utopia, or Bacon, much later, shudder to trust his 
weighty philosophical cargo in the same vessel with The Faery 
Queen or Hamlet; but when it came to the glorification of 
English deeds and English kings, the English tongue was 
clearly the only fitting medium. We ma/ thus affirm that 
th_is^utburst of historical and kindred writing had much to do 
with the development of English vernacular prose, and in con- 
firming thoughtful men to a preference for their own tongue 
over outworn and medieval Latin. 

Once more, nearly all early Elizabethan English prose 
moved in the leading-strings of Latin. "It had been more 
easier and fit for my trade in study," says Ascham once more, 
"to have written this book either in Latin or Greek"; and 
when that excellent old teacher discourses of pedagogy his 
thoughts are riveted on the study of the classics. To write 
good prose was then to emulate Cicero; to write good English 
was to transfer Latin terms and Latin constructions to the 
modern tongue. To the present day we recognize a difference 
between the formality of the bookish tongue and everyday 
colloquial speech. And that difference arose out of the Latin 
foundations of English style. Until recently grammarians 
of English used an antiquated Latin desk full of pigeon-holes, 
if it may so be put, elaborately constructed to contain, each 



lo THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

in its place, the many rules of Latin grammar. True, it might 
be difficult to find English material to fill all these compart- 
ments allotted to rules and exceptions. But for what was 
language given us, if not that the grammarians might wreak 
their ingenuity upon it ? And so our tongue was contorted and 
analyzed, distinguished and subtilized until nearly every 
pigeon-hole in the Latin desk was filled. Here, again, was a 
recognition of the effect of Latin on English. But it is to be 
most carefully observed that, though often devout almost to 
slavishness in the worship of classical models, the writers of 
Elizabeth's day recognized to the full — as some others have 
not — that to confuse the vocabularies of two tongues is to 
write in neither. The Latinism of the Elizabethans is a Lat- 
inism of construction, not a Latinism of vocabulary. They 
could write "without all question" (sine omni dnhitatione), 
speak of "the ill" (malt) for bad men, or say, like Milton, 
He, after Eve seduced, unminded shrunk 
Into the wood fast by; 
but it was reserved for Sir Thomas Browne, a subject of 
Charles H, to write "Embrace not the opacous and blind side 
of opinions, but that which looks most luciferously or influen- 
tially unto goodness"; and for Dr. Samuel Johnson, a subject 
of the Georges, to define, for simplicity's sake, a fit as "a 
paroxysm or exacerbation of any intermittent distemper." 

By far the most interesting of the prose chronicles of Eng- 
land, enumerated above, is that of Holinshed; for aside from 
the importance and excellence of this work, it was to this book 
that Shakespeare turned most frequently for the material of 
his chronicle plays. Ralph, or Raphael, Holinshed is first 
met early in the reign of Elizabeth as a translator or utility 
writer in the printing office of one Reginald Wolfe. Wolfe 
seems to have been a man of ambition and ideas. He had 
designed a universal history and a cosmography which was 
to include elaborate illustrations and maps. He had inherited 
the notes of the indefatigable librarian and antiquary of Henry 
Vni, John Leland, who in his peregrinations claimed to have 
visited "almost every bay, river, lake, mountain, valley, moor, 
heath, wood, city, castle, manor house and college in the land," 



HARRISON'S "DESCRIPTION OF ENGLAND" ii 

who sought to collect manuscripts from the dismantled mon- 
asteries for the king's library, and who sedulously hived in- 
formation and antiquarian, topographical, and literary material 
for more than thirty years. But "after five and twenty year 
travail spent therein," Wolfe died, and his successors, alarmed 
at the impracticable magnitude of his undertaking, reduced 
his plan to a history and description of the British Islands. 

Holinshed continued in their employ, and became respon- 
sible for the greater part of the work. But others, likewise, 
were associated in it: among them William Harrison, at that 
time chaplain to Lord Cobham, Edmund Campion, the not- 
able Jesuit missionary and martyr, and Richard Stanihurst, 
an eccentric Irish scholar and translator of Vergil. Stanihurst 
contributed the greater part of the history of his own country, 
adapting it chiefly from Giraldus Cambrensis. Holinshed 
was assisted likewise in that part of his work w^hich dealt with 
Scotland; and his sources here were chiefly the histories of 
Hector Boece and John Major. It is to Harrison that we owe 
the delightful prefatory Description of England, the founda- 
tion book of any knowledge at first hand of the England of 
Elizabeth. Several qualities conspire to give this work its 
permanent value. First of all, Harrison tells us what we want 
to know, from the order of the nobility and the constitution 
of bishoprics to the nature of the houses people lived in, the 
clothes they v/ore, and the hour at which they dined. Sec- 
ondly, Harrison's style is ever direct, colloquial, and racy in its 
originality of view and command of idiomatic English. Again, 
the personality of Harrison, which is always present, is most 
engaging in his honesty, outspokenness, and sanity of attitude. 
The naivete of Harrison's nature, too, is unceasingly enter- 
taining. It was this that caused him to find nothing irrelevant 
in a digression as to how he obtained tulips for his garden 
from Holland or in the circumstantial details of Mrs. Har- 
rison's brewing of March beer. Harrison includes the com- 
monplace and discusses the obvious, and as neither the com- 
monplace nor the obvious of the England of his day is such 
to the reader of the twentieth century, he contrives to give us 
the "very age and body of the time, his form and pressure." 



12 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

Thus, in the chapter devoted to the degrees of people in 
the commonwealth of England, we are informed with a search- 
ing insight into human nature quite applicable to to-day: 

Whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, whoso abideth in the 
university, giving his mind unto his book, or professeth physic and 
the liberal sciences, or beside his service in the room of a captain in 
the wars, or good counsel given at home, whereby this common- 
wealth is benefited, can live without manual labor, and thereto is 
able to bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he 
shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed upon him by heralds 
(who in the charter of the same do of custom pretend antiquity and 
service, and many gay things), and thereunto, being made so good 
cheap, be called master (which is the title that men give to esquires 
and gentlemen), and reputed for a gentleman ever after. 

Elsewhere, affording more direct information, Harrison 
tells us: 

With us the nobility, gentry, and students do ordinarily go to din- 
ner at eleven before noon, and to supper at five, or between five and 
six at afternoon. The merchants dine and sup seldom before twelve 
at noon, and six at night, especially in London. The husbandmen 
dine also at high noon as they call it, and sup at seven or eight; but 
out of the term in our universities the scholars dine at ten. As for 
the poorest sort they generally dine and sup when they may, so that 
to talk of their order of repast it were but a needless matter. 

To return to Holinshed, his part in the Chronicles, aside 
from general supervision, was the compiling of the history of 
England from the coming of Brute to 1577. As thus issued, 
Holinshed's Chronicles appeared in two large folio volumes 
illustrated with portraits, pictures of battles, and the like 
and enjoyed an immediate success. Holinshed died in 1580, 
and the second edition, of 1587, was edited by John Hooker 
alias Vowell with the help once more of several co-workers, 
notable among them John Stow, author of the Survey of 
London. The style of Holinshed's Chronicles is clear and 
dignified, though little distinguished by the graces. The 
editors strove to get at the truth as they understood it, and 
quoted an enormous array of authorities. Moreover the 
work is patriotic and Protestant to the core, and absolutely 



HOLINSHED'S "CHRONICLES" 13 

honest in its faiths and convictions. However, the Eliza- 
bretTian conception of history vt^as Hmited. It knew^ nothing 
of historical perspective and weighed scarcely at all the rela- 
tive importance of the events which it detailed. It knew very 
little of historical portraiture, but followed the caricatures 
which partisanship had created, and repeated the tales which 
gossip had forged. Comets and pestilence were God's por- 
tents of his intervention in the affairs of men. Droughts and 
tempests, like contemporary murders and trials for witch- 
craft, were fit subjects for its pages with the progresses of 
kings and the falls and misfortunes of princes. Between 
More's distorted "biography" of Richard III, the enemy of 
the House of Lancaster, and Bacon's historical portraiture 
of the first Tudor Henry, there is little historical writing 
approaching our modern ideals and conceptions; for the 
method of annals, the facile and thoughtless art of the narrator, 
the simplicity of the repeater of tales and rumors, mark Hall^ 
Holinshed, and Stow alike. Shakespeare used his materials 
in Holinshed, as elsewhere, honestly, even faithfully; and it 
is always a new surprise to turn from one of his historical 
plays to the corresponding passages in Holinshed and realize 
how close is his following: 

Shortly after happened a strange and uncouth wonder, which 
afterward was the cause of much trouble in the realm of Scotland, as 
ye shall after hear. It fortuned as Macbeth and Banquo journied 
towards Forres, where the king then lay, they went sporting by the 
way together without other company, save only themselves, passing 
through the woods and fields, when suddenly in the midst of a land, 
there met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling 
creatures of elder world, whom when they attentively beheld, wonder- 
ing much at the sight, the first of them spake and said: 'All hail, 
Macbeth, thane of Glamis!' (for he had lately entered into that dig- 
nity and office by the death of his father, Sinell). The second of 
them said: 'Hail, Macbeth, thane of Cawdor!' But the third said: 
'All hail, Macbeth, that hereafter shalt be king of Scotland!' . . . 

Herewith the aforesaid women vanished immediately out of their 
sight. This was reputed at the first but some vain fantastical illusion 
by Macbeth and Banquo, insomuch that Banquo would call Macbeth 
in jest, king of Scotland. . . . But afterwards the common 



14 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is 
(as ye would say) the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or 
fairies, indued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical 
science, because every thing came to pass as they had spoken. 

Which of us reading this passage for the first time could 
fail to be surprised that the words "the weird sisters" are 
borrowed thence by Shakespeare ? Indeed, considering 
Shakespeare's employment of this ancient quarry and the 
permanence of the ideas which cultivated men and women 
have derived from his plays, it may be questioned whether 
our general conception of the personages of earlier English 
history have not been derived more from Holinshed than from 
any other writer. Prince Hal, a wild and roistering youngster, 
reformed by responsibility into a model sovereign; Hunch- 
back Richard, malevolent, unrepentant, capable of any 
crime; "Good Duke Humphrey"; Margaret, Queen of 
Henry VI, "the she wolf of France"; cool, calculating Boling- 
broke; wronged, pathetic, and unhappy Katherine, who does 
not recognize these popular portraits .? And what student of 
history does not know to how large a degree they are perver- 
sions of historical facts ? 

Even more popular than the Chronicles was Foxe's Book 
of Martyrs, printed again and again between its first appear- 
ance in 1563 and the end of the century. John Foxe had 
studied at Oxford and resigned his fellowship at Magdalen 
in 1545 in consequence of his Protestant convictions. There- 
after he lived much abroad, but returned to England on the 
accession of Elizabeth and died, in 1587, a prebend at Salis- 
bury. He appears to have sacrificed preferment in the church 
to conscientious scruples as to surplices and ceremonials; and 
it is to his credit that he plead, though in vain, that mercy 
might be accorded the much persecuted Anabaptists. The 
portentous title of Foxe's remarkable work reads: "Acts 
and Monuments of these latter and perilous days, touching 
matters of the Church, wherein are comprehended and de- 
scribed the great persecutions and horrible troubles that have 
been wrought and practised by the Romish Prelates, espe- 
cially in this Realm of England and Scotland, from the year 



FOXE'S "BOOK OF MARTYRS" 15 

of our Lord, a thousand unto the time now present." It was 
later augmented, first by Foxe and then by others, to include 
"a universal history of the church" at least so far as it con- 
cerned Christian martyrdom. A late edition of Foxe (1804) 
contains 2123 large pages in double columns of rather small 
print, in three volumes, which it is an effort for any but an 
athlete to wield. Foxe's book received the sanction of the 
bishops, and an order of the Anglican Convocation of 157 1 
"placed it in the hall of every bishop in England." In Pro- 
testant households of standing it lay ever at hand for the old to 
ponder and for the young to devour. Foxe is vivid, pictur- 
esque and circumstantial. He had a thesis to defend for the 
illustration of which the unchristian conduct of Christian men 
in all ages afforded him only too many terrible examples. 
Flis work is a huge party pamphlet and is often distorted, 
unhistorical, and unfair. But it was not more distorted or 
unfair than were the works which attacked it; and its stanch 
patriotism and Protestantism, albeit the latter was fanatical, 
wrought wonders in knitting Englishmen together to repel 
alike the invasion of Spain and the more insidious efforts of the 
Jesuits' missions to reclaim Protestant England to the mother 
faith of Rome. 

There remains a kindred topic. If Englishmen in their 
re-awakened national consciousness "joyed to read the doings 
of brave Talbot against the French" and the martial deeds of 
Edward against the Bruce or Percy against Douglas, no less 
intense was their interest in their present world, in the ad- 
venturous spirit that animated Drake to compass the globe 
or Essex to "singe the beard of the Spanish king" at Cadiz. 
Martin Frobisher and Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins 
and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, what heart of English speaking 
man but warms at the mention of these valiant sea dogs, "old 
England's ever memorable worthies," their daring on many 
seas, their buccaneering, their grasp after Spanish gold, their 
trust in God and in England! Richard Hakluyt — or Hackle- 
wit, which attests his English origin — was a man of one idea, 
and that was geography and the history of discovery. He 
tells us that while a student at Oxford, "I read whatever 



i6 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

printed or written discoveries and voyages I found extant, 
either in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portugal, French or 
English languages." Later he became a lecturer on cos- 
mography and w^as among the first to show "the new lately 
reformed maps, globes, spheres and other instruments of this 
art, for demonstration in the public schools." In 1582 
Hakluyt published his first work. Divers Voyages touching 
the Discovery of America, and he continued almost to the date 
of his death, in the same year with Shakespeare, an unwearied 
collector and investigator in the field of his choice. Like 
Harrison, Hakluyt was a clergyman and his various livings 
and preferments gave him the means and the leisure to prose- 
cute his favorite work. Hakluyt's most noteworthy under- 
taking was The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Dis- 
coveries of the English Nation "made by sea or overland to 
the remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth at any 
time within the compass of these 1500 years, 1589." The 
range of this work is extraordinary and the zeal with which 
the editor labored, collecting, translating, and adapting every 
account of a voyage on which he could lay hands is altogether 
unparalleled. The slave trade of Sir John Hawkins and his 
barter and buccaneering among the Spaniards of the West 
Indies; Sir Francis Drake and his amazing success in rifling 
unprotected Peru, with his circumnavigation of the globe to 
escape reprisal; Sir Humphrey Gilbert's search after gold 
and the northwest passage, and the heroic death that he found 
at sea : such are some of the themes of this prose laureate of 
England's earliest geographical expansion. Variously en 
larged and rewritten as it was in later editions, Hakluyt's P'^in- 
cipal Navigations constitutes a marvelous and exceedingly 
circumstantial piece of evidence of the astonishing activity 
that preceded the laying of those foundations on which the 
future empire of England beyond the seas was to rest. While 
at first curiosity, and then patriotism, seem to have called 
Hakluyt to his task, he displays a consistent interest in the 
growth of trade and in the economic aspects of his subject, 
as we should call them to-day; and again and again we meet 
with him in the counsels of the newly founded East India 



HAKLUYT AND HIS SUCCESSORS 17 

Company or in projects and petitions promoting colonization 
in Virginia and elsewhere. Hakluyt belongs to other fields 
than those of literature and yet the dead level of his utihtarian 
prose is not unbroken at times with a smack of the larger 
utterance of his age. 

Hakluyt was only the greatest of his class, like Holinshed 
among the chroniclers. Hakluyt's avowed successor was 
Samuel Purchase (1577-1626), a Cambridge man, parson of 
St. Martin's Ludgate. Purchase his Pilgrims, as he called 
his collection of voyages, was published in 1625 and is a work 
decidedly below that of Hakluyt in style, arrangement, and 
editorial judgment. In an earlier work of Purchase, en- 
titled his Pilgrimage, he had put together a species of gazetteer 
of previous English voyages of discovery. Besides these 
greater works, many lesser pamphlets attest English adven- 
tures on the sea and in strange lands. The Last Fight of the 
Revenge, described by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1591, is cast in 
remarkably vivid and honest prose, and may be taken as 
typical of the epic height which this literature of fact attained 
at times in the hands of greater writers. The Revenge, single 
handed, had fought fifteen Spanish ships of war for fifteen 
hours : 

All the powder of the Revenge to the last barrel was now spent, 
all her pikes broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of 
the rest hurt. In the beginning of the fight she had but one hundred 
free from sickness, and four score and ten sick, laid in hold upon the 
ballast. A small troop to man such a ship, and a weak garrison to 
resist so mighty an army. By those hundred all was sustained, the 
volleys, boardings, and enterings of fifteen ships of war, besides those 
which beat her at large. On the contrary, the Spanish were always 
supplied with soldiers brought from every squadron: all manner of 
arms and powder at will. Unto ours there remained no comfort at 
all, no hope, no supply either of ships, men, or weapons; the masts all 
beaten overboard, all her tackle cut asunder, her upper work altogether 
rased, and in effect evened she was with the water, but the very foun- 
dation or bottom of a ship, nothing being left overhead either for 
flight or defense. Sir Richard finding himself in this distress, and 
unable any longer to make resistance, .... commanded the 
master gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute man, to split and 



i8 THE LITERATURE OF FACT 

sink the ship; that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory 
to the Spaniards. 

It was then that the Spanish admiral offered honorable 
ransom and a return to England for all; for he admired the 
desperate courage of his foes. At last Sir Richard, who was 
sorely wounded, was conveyed aboard the admiral's ship. 
From a Dutch writer, who had at first hand the Spanish 
report of this encounter, we learn that, on the Spanish gal- 
leon after the fight, and wounded among his enemies, Sir 
Richard "would carouse three or four glasses of wine and in 
a bravery take the glasses between his teeth and crush them 
in pieces and swallow them down." He was dying, and he 
longed for death. When the supreme moment came "he 
spake these words" : 

Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for 
that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought 
for his country, queen, religion, and honor, whereby my soul most 
joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave behind it 
an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his 
duty as he was bound to do. 

Into the corresponding works of the poets we can not 
enter here. They were more imaginative and reconstructive, 
and therefore less true to the actualities of stirring Elizabethan 
life. The true epic of such an age of action must be close to 
the deeds it depicts, though this represents but one phase of 
multiform Elizabethan life. We shall meet with higher 
ideals than these which are tethered to fact and national wel- 
fare, but we shall meet with no truer exponents of the material 
side of the national spirit that made modern England than 
Holinshed's chronicles of the political and social past of the 
nation, than Foxe's affirmation -and justification of the 
Protestant position, or Hakluyt's thousand and one tales of 
the distant gropings and graspings after empire that laid 
the beginnings of greater Britain and her dominion over the 
sea. 



CHAPTER II 
LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

THE medieval conception of the true gentleman excluded 
books, and culture by means of books. "When 
amongst knights or gentlemen," says Guevara, "talk is of 
arms, a gentleman ought to have great shame to say, that he 
read it, but rather that he saw it. For it is very convenient 
for the philosopher to recount what he hath read, but the 
knight or gentleman it becomes to speak of things that he 
hath done." The gentleman of the Renaissance added to 
the medieval virtues, which were prowess in war and wisdom 
at the council table, the new qualities of a love of learning and 
a taste and knowledge in the arts. The large and diverse 
interests of Sir Philip Sidney, the mirror and pattern of the 
Elizabethan gentleman, included athletic address on the 
tilting field, the theory and practice of war, the training of 
the courtier and the diplomat, a deep seated veneration for 
the classics, and the modern man's acquaintance with his own 
and foreign modern literatures. To Sidney were dedicated, 
among many other books, Spenser's Shepherds' Calendar, 
the first edition of Hakluyt's Voyages, and philosophical 
writings of the Italian skeptic and philosopher, Giordano 
Bruno; for Sidney was equally interested in the future of 
English letters and of English colonial ismpire beyond the seas, 
in the introduction of foreign meters to beautify English poetry, 
and in the preservation of the balance of Protestant power 
against the intrigues and encroachments of Philip of Spain. 
In that beautiful book. The Courtier of Baldassare Castig- 
lione, we have an engaging picture of the little court of Urbino 
in the early years of the sixteenth century. There the graces 
of conduct and the virtues of kindliness abounded; and a 
sweet and unaff'ected converse, combined with innocent merri- 
ment, all presided over by the grave but courteous duchess 

19 



20 LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

of that state. This circle was doubtless not so brilliant as 
the notable assembly which met in Florence at the fiat of 
Lorenzo the Magnificent, where Pulci, Ficino, Pico, and 
Poliziano discoursed learnedly and eloquently of state, art, 
literature, and philosophy. But at Urbino there was a comity 
of spirit, a "sweet conversation that is occasioned of an amiable 
and loving company"; and while we may recognize in its 
externals traces of that worldliness, lightness, and vanity which 
rise to the surface like froth in any current of social life, it 
held before it wholesome and gracious ideals, honoring gentle- 
ness and delicacy in man no less than in woman and offering 
a conclusive refutation to the charge that the Italy of the 
Renaissance was hopelessly abandoned and corrupt. A 
similar court was that of Margaret of Navarre, patroness of 
poets and lover of literature, Platonism, and the amenities of 
gentle social life. Without here anticipating, it is clear that 
the Sidneian circle of the Countess of Pembroke, that was to 
come, was not without its precedent in foreign lands. 

Modern English poetry found its earliest cultivation in 
the select circles of the court. The old sacred drama, originat- 
ing in the church, had come out into the public places of the 
market towns; it flourished in York, Chester, Coventry, and 
was popular and provincial. So, too, the ballad, that truest 
example of folk-poetry, was tied neither to place nor to poet, 
but was an utterance of the people at large. On the other 
hand, Chaucer was a poet of London and the court; Gower, a 
wealthy gentleman of Kent, attendant on his king, and learned 
and dull in three languages; while the best of the Scotch 
Chaucerians, from King James to Dunbar, were either royal 
or in the royal service. So when English poetry revived to 
shake off the traditions of medievalism, the first awakening 
was at court, Henry VIII was an accomplished and affable 
young man, a lover of the arts, a good musician, and not 
without claim to an humble rank as a poet; and he was 
surrounded by "a crew of courtly makers," foremost among 
them Wyatt and Surrey who were imbued with like tastes and 
talents. Neither Wyatt nor Surrey intrinsically amount to 
very much. In form they limp only too often to the tiresome 



THE SONNET AND BLANK-VERSE 21 

tune of what was known as Poulter's measure, a verse of alter- 
nate sixes and sevens: 

So feeble is the thread, that doth the burden stay. 
Of my poor Hfe, in heavy pHght that falleth in decay; 
That but it have elsewhere some aid or some succors, 
The running spindle of my fate anew shall end his course. 

Inexpressibly tiresome is this kind of thing when prolonged 
to any degree. In substance, too, the Wyatt-Surreian lover, 
faint-hearted, languishing, and despairing, begets in the 
modern reader, according to mood, disgust or mocking laugh- 
ter. Yet there are better things in both poets; and historically 
their importance is unquestionable. Wyatt experimented in 
English verse, counting his syllables; Surrey attained a 
smoothness and ease such as no one had reached in England 
since Chaucer. Both poets attempted new meters as well 
as novel-subject matter, derived from Italy and France. 
Wyatt, before its rage in the latter country, had introduced the 
sonnet into England; and, with it, that close imitation and 
translation of Petrarch, master of the sonneteers, and of the 
Petrarchists of France, which was to beconie so distinguishing 
a characteristic of Elizabethan lyrists. The sonnet thus took 
the English fancy and became, in time, one of the noblest of 
English lyrical forms. The French ballade, on the contrary, 
also employed by Wyatt, was so little understood that Wyatt's 
first editor, Grimald, misprinted it; and save for Charles 
Cotton in the Stuarts' reign, the lallade remained unknown 
to English until revived in our own day. On the other hand, 
Surrey in more facile versification confirmed the practice of 
the sonnet and attempted an imitation of the Italian versi 
scioltt, a free or unrimed verse of ten syllables, known to 
English literature as blank-verse. Surely it was no small 
service to point the way to "Marlowe's mighty line," to be 
the first to practise a measure immortalized by Shakespeare 
and Milton. Surrey's translation of parts of the jEneid is 
the earliest English blank-verse. Nor is the metrical form 
of these two early Tudor poets their only claim on our con- 
sideration. In them appears for the first time in English 



22 LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

the subjective note that has come so markedly to distinguish 
modern poetry. It was this, though it marked Httle more 
than disconsolate love, that w^as recognized in TotteVs Mis- 
cellany, and in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, 
Clement Robinson's Handful of Pleasant Delights, and The 
Paradise of Dainty Devises, the anthologies of like charac- 
ter, if inferior repute, that followed Tottel in the seventies. 
What Wyatt and Surrey groped for in the lyric of art, 
George Gascoigne, chief of poets between their time and 
Spenser's, furthered with a certain originality and force of 
his own. Gascoigne was born between 1530 and 1535 and 
educated at Cambridge, the Middle Temple, and Gray's 
Inn. Of honorable family but far from rich, Gascoigne 
gravitated naturally to court and remained, with an interval 
of service as a soldier in the Low Countries, a courtier and 
protege at one time of Lord Grey de Wilton, at last of Elizabeth 
herself. It was in the congenial society of his fellows of the 
Inns of Court that Gascoignei^first became an author and his 
versatility in poetry, drama, and prose was as great as his 
contemporary reputation. Under the title of A Hundreth 
Sundry Flowers hound up in one Small Posy, Gascoigne had at- 
tempted, by 1572, songs and sonnets in the manner of Surrey, 
elegies, autobiographical and narrative poems, in excellence 
well above the best work of his immediate contemporaries, 
a satire in blank verse of considerable merit entitled The 
Steel Glass, and three dramas, each somewhat a departure in 
its own kind. The prose writings of Gascoigne also deserve 
attention for a directness and simplicity of style and a freedom 
from Latinism rare in his day. To Gascoigne belong the 
earliest set treatise on versification in the English language 
and the first attempt to imitate, on the basis of an English 
story, the "novels" of Italy already popular in England in 
the translations of Painter, Fenton, and others. Gascoigne's 
story. The Adventures of Master Ferdinando 'Jeronimi (other- 
wise Master Freeman Jones) enjoyed, like some of his poetry, 
a repute not a little enhanced by allusions and innuendoes of 
a scandalous nature. Yet Gascoigne was one of the choir of 
poets that welcomed Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth at the 



GASCOIGNE AND HIS ASSOCIATES 23 

command of the Earl of Leicester during the festivities there 
in 1575. Gascoigne's poetry is always egotistic, it is often 
autobiographical. He was overwhelmed at times with repen-, 
tance for "his youth misspent" and employed his later days 
in penning devotional pamphlets and eulogizing the queen in 
what seems a measurably successful endeavor to serve in the 
royal employ. Gascoigne was not a scholar though he was 
a cultivated man of the world; and both in his sensible little 
treatise, Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the Making 
of Verse and Rime in English, and in his practice of the art of 
poetry, he maintained an attitude of remarkable independence 
alike of classical models and of modern foreign influences. 

Gascoigne's literary associates include such now forgotten 
names as Francis Kinwelmarsh, his coadjutor in the transla- 
tion of the tragedy Jocasta, Alexander Nevile, translator of 
Seneca, Barnabe Googe, writer of Eclogues, and Thomas 
Churchyard, general pamphleteer. Other poetical contem- 
poraries were the Earl of Oxford, Humphrey Gilford, Matthew 
Grove, and Thomas Howell. George Whetstone's prosaic 
Muse celebrated Gascoigne's obsequies. But among the 
commendatory verses prefixed to the Posies, one set is signed 
with initials that may stand for Gabriel Harvey, Spenser's 
Hobbinol and Mentor of the Areopagus, whilst to The Steel 
Glass we find prefixed a series of verses signed "Walter Rawely 
of the Middle Temple." Indeed, when Gascoigne died, in 
1577, Spenser had already passed to^his master's degree at 
Cambridge and but two years remained to the publication of 
The Shepherds' Calendar and the broad daylight of Elizabethan 
poetry. As for Sidney, though but twenty-two years of age, 
he was already abroad on an embassy to the Emperor of 
Germany and the poetry of Astrophel and Stella was soon 
to be seething in his brain. 

Philip Sidney was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord 
Deputy of Ireland and President of Wales, one of Elizabeth's 
most tried and faithful servants; his mother was sister to 
Robert Dudley, the great Earl of Leicester who courted Queen 
Elizabeth so assiduously. The Sidneys were of better blood 
than the Dudleys. Sir Henry appears to have been too honest 



24 LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

to become wealthy; but Philip, as his eldest son, with birth the 
most honorable and as nephew and possible heir to Leicester, 
started with much that fortune could give. Sidney enjoyed, 
too, the best of educations, going to Shrewsbury School and 
thence to Oxford. It was at Shrewsbury that Sidney formed 
his enduring friendship with Fulke Greville. Sidney was a 
grave and precocious youth and employed the leisure of his 
attendance at court in travel abroad, or in study. His 
interests were general — history, "plantation," as coloniza- 
tion was called, politics, philosophy, science, and literature. 
An idea of the diversity of Sidney's talents may be gleaned 
from the fact that he was prized by William the Silent as "one 
of the ripest and greatest counselors of estate in Europe/' 
esteemed by the learned Languet for his scholarship, appreciat- 
ed for his love of philosophy by Giordano Bruno, intimate with 
Drake, Frobisher, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert for his interest 
in adventurous voyage and colonization, and beloved by the 
poets — Spenser foremost among them — for his poetry. 
"There was not an approved painter, skilful engineer, ex- 
cellent musician, or any other artificer of fame that made him- 
self not known to him," says Greville. 

Like the poetry of Wyatt and Gascoigne, that of Sidney 
and of Spenser maintained a tradition and a cult. Confined 
to a limited and select circle, it emulated in its practice and 
its patronage of the arts the amenities of Italian courts such 
as that of Urbino and in its theories about literature and its 
experiments in poetry, the group of writers known in France 
as the Pl'eiade. The Arcadia, written in the seclusion of 
Penshurst, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, read to a group 
of intimate friends there, page by page, and dedicated to the 
author's beloved sister; The Faery Queen, allegorically setting 
forth the doings of the queen and noble personages of her 
court, as much a book of the ideal man and of ideal conduct 
in life as The Courtier itself; Lyly's Euphues, the popular 
novel of the moment, no less the work of an attendant at 
court and no less addressed to a select and limited audience: 
all of these belong to the literature of the coterie. And so 
do Lyly's dramas and in a sense likewise, A Midsummer- 



THE AREOPAGUS 25 

Night's Dream, perhaps prepared to celebrate the marriage 
of that "universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington," to 
the Earl of Bedford in the royal presence. 

Sidney's poetry was, in even a narrovv^er sense than this, 
literature of the coterie. From certain letters exchanged 
between Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, we learn that, in the 
late seventies, there existed in London a species of literary 
club called the Areopagus, which interested itself in poetry, 
experiments in versification, and other literary matters. This 
intimacy of the young poets and courtiers of the time is in- 
terestingly illustrated in many poems and especially in the 
"two pastorals made by Sir Philip Sidney upon his meeting 
his two worthy friends Sir Edward Dyer and Mr. Fulke 
Greville." A couple of stanzas will show the relation: 

Join, mates, in mirth with me. 

Grant pleasure to our meeting, 
Let Pan, our good god, see 

How grateful is our greeting. 
Join hearts and hands, so let it be; 
Make but one mind in bodies three. 

Sweet Orpheus' harp, whose sound 

The steadfast mountains moved, 
Let here thy skill abound 

To join sweet friends beloved. 
Join hearts and hands, so let it be; 
Make but one mind in bodies three. 

"This happy blessed trinity," as it is called in another 
stanza, was the heart of the Areopagus. About these three 
were clustered a chosen few that were interested in poetry 
and in theories about it. Spenser, then newly come to court, 
could not fail to be drawn into such a brotherhood, whilst 
Gabriel Harvey, the pedantic and somewhat unwise but 
zealous Cambridge don, friend and self-constituted Mentor 
of Spenser, surveyed the proceedings from afar and amused 
himself — ^ if not others — by writing censorious or jocular 
letters to Spenser on the subjects of the discussion, all of 
which letters, as we have seen, Harvey carefully preserved 



26 LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

and printed a few years later for general edification and for 
the particular aggrandisement of his own importance. Later 
members of the Areopagus were Samuel Daniel and Abraham 
Fraunce, like Harvey a champion and practicer of English 
hexameter verse. 

The Areopagus entered heart and soul into a discussion of 
the most pressing literary problem of the day, the relative 
merits of ancient and modern versification. This question 
had been first mooted in print in England by the excellent 
Ascham, in his Schoolmaster, printed in 1570, two years after 
the author's death. Gascoigne wrote his sensible little treatise 
as we have seen, some five years later, laying down rules of 
thumb for the making of English verse; and King James 
followed, exercising his boyish pen in the same momentous 
subject in the preface to a volume which he entitled Essays 
of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesy, 1 586. With the 
example of Roman literature before them, a literature based 
on that of Greece and successful in the main only where it 
had faithfully followed its prototypes, it was not surprising 
that men, educated in the classics, should conceive that the 
salvation of English literature was to be reached only in a 
slavish following of the ancients. Long were the discussions 
of Harvey, Spenser, and others concerning the quantities of 
English words. Thomas Drant, the translator of Horace, 
set up a system, the rival of Harvey's. William Webbe, a 
tutor of St. John's College, Cambridge, in A Discourse of 
English Poetry, 1586, ventilated his opinion "touching the 
reformation of our English verse" and "travestied" a poem 
or two of The Shepherds' Calendar into sapphlcs; Stanihurst, 
even doing six books of the ^neid into some of the most 
astonishing vernacular hexameters that have ever been per- 
petrated in the name of poetry. Sidney alone of his time 
discerned the larger issues of this controversy, and, recognizing 
the beauties of Italian poetry as. well as those of the classics, 
conducted a marvellously complete set of experiments in 
classical meters and Italian forms: the more marvellous 
when we remember his preoccupation and the extraordinary 
variety of interests that claimed his attention and his time. 



SIDNEY'S EXPERIMENTS IN VERSE 27 

Not to pursue this topic too far, it may none the less be re- 
corded that an elaborate and important treatise on The Art of 
English Poesy, pubhshed in 1589 and attributed to George 
Puttenham, upholds the possibilities of English versification 
in the course of an exhaustive discussion of matters historical, 
rhetorical, and fantastic concerning poetry and language at 
large. Indeed, the latest guns in this long controversy were 
not fired until the very last years of Elizabeth's reign when 
Thomas Campion, musician and lyric poet, and Samuel 
Daniel, one of the last of the Sidneian circle, measured swords 
on the subject in their tracts, entitled respectively Observations 
on the Art of English Poesy and A Defense of Rime, l6o2 and 
1603. 

But let us return to Sidney and his experiments in exotic 
forms of verse. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella/offers a com- 
plete vindication of the sonnet, practised in a dozen different 
forms, to adoption into the English language. In the poems 
which diversify the Arcadia, may be found experiments in 
the terza rima, the dignified and exquisite verse of the Divina 
Corned ia of Dante; in the canzone and in the sestina, intricate 
interlacings of successive stanzas; and in the madrigal, a 
dainty little verse-form, commonly written for music. There 
likewise are as successful achievements in classical sapphics, 
anacreontics, elegiacs, and hexameters as may be devised in 
a tongue which is compelled, as is English, to substitute, 
as a governing feature, accentual stress for the classic principle 
of quantity, and an arbitrary ascription of quantity to English 
syllables for that nice system which the genius of classical 
prosody had invoked. In a word, Sidney tested by exhaus- 
tive experiment the possibilities of both classical and Italian 
metrical forms transplanted into English verse. He died 
before he made known his verdict. But when it is recalled that 
no poem of his was published in his lifetime, we cannot affirm 
that he was absolutely satisfied with his results. 

But we are not without knowledge of Sidney's larger tenets 
as to literature and art. The age was full of literary con- 
troversy. Ascham had inveighed against riming and the 
running of the letter with "the Gothic barbarism" that fos- 



28 LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

tered it; but he had warned the age against "the Siren en- 
chantments of Italy" and declared "an Itahanate EngHshman 
an incarnate devil." Gascoigne, on the other hand, was 
content to treat of English verse as it was, and waste no time 
either in abuse or in praise of foreign matters. Another ques- 
tion of the day was raised by the new and surprising up-growth 
and popularity of vernacular plays acted on improvised stages 
in public taverns and other resorts. In 1579 Stephen Gosson 
wrote a book which he entitled The School of Abuse, "z pleas- 
ant invective against poets, pipers, players, jesters, and such 
like caterpillars of the commonwealth. " This, as its title sets 
forth, was one of a series of attacks upon the stage and its 
abuses — attacks which were often extended Puritanically 
to include all art. Gosson was a renegade actor and play- 
wright and exhibits much of the zeal and rancor of the re- 
claimed. Whether in impudence or in honest mistake, he 
dedicated his School to Sidney, and "was for his labor scorned," 
reports Spenser, "at least if it be in the goodness of that nature 
to scorn." Gosson was almost immediately answered by 
Lodge in a Defense of Poesy, Music, and Stage Plays, a book 
of much eloquence and suavity; and soon after Sidney wrote 
his own Defense, not for publication, but for circulation among 
his friends. 

Sidney's Defense of Poesy is a work of genuine and fervid 
enthusiasm, remarkable in its breadth and liberality, and of 
a nature comparable at least in its effects to Lessing's famous 
Laocoon. Sidney transcended the limits of Gosson's petty 
objections to consider on wide and philosophical grounds the 
nature of poetry, its relation to history and to philosophy, and 
eloquently to plead its divine origin and its beneficent influence 
on human life. Nor is it a serious criticism of this work to 
acknowledge the influence upon it of "current continental 
criticism." But admirable as The Defense was in its day, the 
historical value of this little treatise is even greater; for it 
defines for us the position of a talented, judicious, and inde- 
pendent young critic about the time that Spenser was begin- 
ning The Faery Queen and Shakespeare was still wandering, 
a mischievous rather than a dreamy lad, among the lanes of 



"THE DEFENSE OF POESY" 29 

Warwickshire. The Defense of Poesy must have been written 
soon after 1580, though it first appeared in print in 1595. It 
is not, then, surprising that we should find Sidney expressing 
discontent with poetry and declaring that besides Chaucer, 
The Mirror for Magistrates, Surrey's lyrics and The Shep- 
herds' Calendar, "I do not remember to have seen but few 
(to speak boldly) printed that have poetical sinews in them." 
In the Hght of this date of writing, Sidney's praise of Gorboduc 
and his decided preference of Sophocles and Euripides over 
the English dramatists Edwards and Preston, most popular 
of their time, is in no wise amazing. Five or six years were 
yet to elapse before T amhurlaine was to sound a new era for 
English drama, and Gascoigne and Whetstone represented 
the height to which the English dramatic genius had by that 
time attained. Equally interesting is Sidney's attitude of 
criticism towards the new Euphuistic prose, which had al- 
ready fallen into the abuses of excess. He puts his finger 
on three of its distinctive features, declaring of alliterative 
writers that they pursue the "coursing of a letter, as if they 
were bound to follow the method of a dictionary"; likening 
the undue use of ornament to "those Indians" who are "not 
content to wear ear-rings at the fit and natural place of the 
ears, but they will thrust jewels through their nose and lips 
because they will be sure to be fine." But the living value of 
The Defense lies in the liberality and lofty ideality of its con- 
ception of poetry and in its affirmation of poetry's true function 
in life. We have here no petty dallying with the "toys of 
wit," as Puttenham denominates poems, fit only "to fill the 
vacant hours of time of idle courtiers and gentlewomen," but 
the serious assignment of poetry to that concrete representa- 
tion of human ideals in forms of imperishable beauty, which 
has formed an essential part of every true definition of this 
subtlest of the arts since philosophers began to define. 

Let us now turn to the poetry of Sidney. Astrophel and 
Stella (like the rest of Sidney's work) was printed after his 
death, appearing first in a surreptitious edition in 1591, and 
procured for the printers by Thomas Nash, This earliest 
sequence of its kind in the language consists of one hundred 



30 LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

and ten sonnets with a few intercalated lyrics in other meas- 
ures. The series was indubitably inspired by the sonnets of 
Petrarch and the Platonic ideals of love therein upheld by the 
Italian poet's cult of his ideal mistress, Laura. Moreover, 
Sidney was acquainted not only with Italian poetry, but with 
French poetry, notably Ronsard, and the rest of the Pleiade as 
well. He followed their guidance as to the professional manner 
of writing a sonnet, if we may put it so, precisely as he might 
imitate an ancient meter or observe any other poetic con- 
vention. Until lately it has been customary to recognize in 
the fervor of the poetry of Astrophel and Stella the poetical 
expression of a leaf from Sidney's life; and his age appears to 
have accepted his sonnets as such. According to this view, 
Astrophel and Stella sets forth the story of Sidney's love for the 
Lady Penelope Devereux, daughter of the first Earl of Essex 
who was much attached to Sidney and had suggested a match 
between the two as early as 1576, when Philip was twenty and 
Penelope a little maid of twelve. But Sidney, proving un- 
willing, whether from disinclination to marry at all, ambition 
to achieve a higher position than was his before doin^^, or 
indifference, another match was at once arranged for Stella, 
and she was married to the young Lord Rich, who, to say the 
least, neglected her. As to Sidney, he soon found out to his 
disquiet that, having lost Stella forever, he had really never 
ceased to love her; and being a man of poetic temperament 
— the temperament that seeks consolation and relief in artistic 
expression — Sidney spoke out his heart in rime. 

Of late, however, it has been maintained that although 
"Sidney's pursuit of the favor of Lady Rich, a coquettish 
friend of his youth who married another," may have "led him 
to turn sonneteer," "he wrote under the glamour of Petrarchan 
idealism, and held that it was the function of the 'lyrical kind 
of songs and sonnets' to sing 'the praises of the immortal 
beauty' and of no mundane passion."* According to this idea, 
"detachment from the realities of ordinary passion, which 
comes with much reading about love in order to write on the 

* See Sidney Lee, Elizabethan Sonnets, i, xliii; Courthope, 
English Poetry, ii, 227-233. 



"ASTROPHEL AND STELLA" 31 

subject, is the central feature of Sidney's sonnets"; and it is 
shown triumphantly that Sidney borrowed idea after idea 
from Petrarch, Ronsard, and others, addressing the Thames 
only because Ronsard had similarly addressed the Rhone, 
and apostrophizing night, sleep, and the power of Stella's eyes 
only because Petrarch had said all these things before him. 

These parallels need not be questioned either in bulk or 
in detail. But it may well be queried if their mere existence 
is in itself sufficient to deprive the story adumbrated in Sidney's 
sonnets of all subjective basis in fact. However deeply Sidney 
may have been affected by the study which we know he made 
of the poetry of Italy and France, and whatever was to be the 
general practice of English sonneteers to come, there is neither 
anything improbable in the situation nor in the emotions de- 
tailed in Astrophel and Stella. The following sonnet has been 
found to parallel one of Petrarch's; it may none the less have 
certain reference to the joustings of May, 1581, in which Sid- 
ney and his friend Greville appeared as challengers, clothed 
with a sumptuousness and attended by a state that recalled the 
tourneys of the Middle Ages : 

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance 

Guided so well that I obtained the prize. 

Both by the judgment of the English eyes 

And of some sent from that sweet enemy, France; 

Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance, 

Town folks my strength; a daintier judge applies 

His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise; 

Some lucky wits impute it but to chance; 

Others because of both sides I do take 

My blood from them who did excell in this, 

Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make. 

How far they shot awry! the true cause is, 

Stella looked on, and from her heavenly face 

Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race 
And this other sonnet; 

Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame. 

Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee; 

Thine eyes my pride, thy lips mine history: 

If thou praise not, all other praise is shame. 



32 LITERATURE OF THE COTERIE 

Nor so ambitious am I as to frame 

A nest for my young praise in laurel tree; 

In truth, I swear, I wish not there should be 

Graved in my epitaph a poet's name. 

Ne, if I would, could I just title make, 

That any laud thereof to me should grow. 

Without my plumes from others' wings I take: 

For nothing from my wit or will doth flow. 

Since all my words thy beauty doth endite. 

And Love doth hold my hand and makes me write. 

Assuredly such poetry rings with more than the trivial music 
of a mere Petrarchan imitator; or all instinct for poetry must 
go for naught. 

Besides Astrophel and Stella the greater part of Sidney's 
poetry is found strewn incidentally through the pages of his 
romance, the Arcadia. It may be said In general of the poetry 
of the Arcadia that it seems less spontaneous than the sonnets 
of Astrophel, less poetry of direct emotion; and yet we may 
wrong Sidney here if we fail to recognize that delicacy and 
elaboration of workmanship, in any art, need not necessarily 
destroy that sincerity of impulse which is the life principle of 
all the arts. The metrical experiments unconsidered, there 
remains much in the poetry of the Arcadia worthy of the author 
of the burning lines of Astrophel and Stella 

Sidney's poetry is imitative of the loveliest melodies of 
contemporary French and Italian poetry, and resonant with 
deeper notes of the music of the classics. It was Sidney who 
popularized the pastoral mode as well as the sonnet in Eng- 
land. The first served its turn in offering to the poet£ of the 
Elizabethan spring-time a delicate and artistic convention in 
which to cradle their first fledglings. The sonnet had been 
written before, as we have seen, but never with such success, 
in a variety so Italian, or in a sequence which so emulated the 
beauty and glory of the sonnets of Dante and Petrarch. The 
popularization of the "conceit" is a more doubtful service of 
Sidney to the literature of his time. Sidney's romantic temper 
delighted in the ornament of detail, and no grace was to him 
too trivial or bizarre to lavish on the decoration of divine 



THE POETRY OF SIDNEY 33 

poesy. Though thus our first great poet to fall under the spell 
of the petty "conceit" with its extravagant figure and far- 
fetched metaphor, Sidney erred in this less from mere delight 
in these petty baubles of ingenuity than from the passionate 
current of a poetical eloquence that carried great thoughts like 
trifles and trifles like great thoughts on its impetuous torrent. 
More certain immediate services to the literature of his age 
w^ere those in which Sidney proved by experiment the real 
possibilities and limitations of classical prosody as applied to 
the construction of English verse; and laid, by a liberal appli- 
cation of ancient and Renaissance Italian theories to modern 
conditions, the foundations of English aesthetics and criticism. 
But whether for the earnestness and eloquence of his theories 
or for the fervor and sincerity with which he applied them, it 
may be said that Sidney was the poet he was because he was 
the man he was. In the words of his loving and faithful 
Jonathan, Fulke Greville, whose Life of Sidney is one of the 
sweetest and manliest tributes to true friendship that literature 
knows: "His very ways in the world did generally add reputa- 
tion to his Prince and country, by restoring amongst us the 
ancient majesty of noble and true dealing; as a manly wisdom 
that can no more be weighed down by an effeminate craft 
than Hercules could be overcome by that effeminate army of 
dwarfs. And this was it which I profess I loved dearly in 
him, and still shall be glad to honor in the good men of this 
time: I mean that his heart and tongue went both one way, 
and so with every one that went with the truth; as knowing 
no other kindred, party, or end. Above all he made the rehgion 
he professed the firm basis of his life." 



CHAPTER III 

THE NEW CULTIVATED PROSE 

TT has been said that a list of the earliest Elizabethan books 
-■- written in prose is chiefly a list of literary curiosities; 
and to a certain degree this is true, though we are coming 
more and more to understand that modern English prose was 
not the invention of John Dryden or of any other subject of 
King Charles, but had already been formed in all its essential 
particulars in the age that produced Hooker, Bacon, our 
English Bible, and the prose of Shakespeare and Jonson. 
But much had to go before results such as these; and English 
prose no less than English verse was compelled to pass through 
the period of experimentation and to test the value of exotic 
models before it came to its own. We have already heard of 
Elizabethan Latinism and how it was a Latinism of structure 
and idiom rather than a Latinism of vocabulary. When 
learning left the school and the cloister to inhabit likewise 
the court, new ideals were added both to the conception of life 
and to that of literature. Scholarship had its conventions; 
and so, too, had social life. There was a correct way (as to 
which scholars agreed) in which to write the learned lan- 
guage, then, be it remembered, no dead tongue. Might there 
not be an equally correct way in which to write modern 
English, a way in which the graces and elegance of court life 
might be expressed in contradistinction to the common tongue 
which men spoke in the streets and taverns ? 

John Lyly, the Euphuist, was born in Kent about 1554. 
He was a student of Magdalen College, Oxford, and entered 
as plehii filius, which shows that he was a poor man. An- 
thony a Wood, the gossipy biographer of Oxonians, tells us 
that Lyly "was always averse to the crabbed studies of logic 
and philosophy," and that he did "in a manner neglect 
academical studies, yet not so much that he took not the 

34 



LYLY THE EUPHUIST 35 

degrees in arts, that of master being completed in 1575." 
Lyly seems to have sought the patronage of Lord Burleigh 
as far back as 1574; and he must have gone up to London 
and begun attendance on the court soon after taking his mas- 
ter's degree. Lyly was especially desirous of obtaining the 
Mastership of the Queen's Revels, and several letters of his 
relative to this remain. Lyly began his career with Euphues, 
the Anatomy of Wit, registered in 1578 and published in the ^j-^, 
next year. The book was an immediate success, and Lyly ""■" — '■ 
probably spent the better part of 1579 in writing the second 
and longer part, called Euphues and his England, which 
appeared in 1580. Some idea of the esteem in which this 
book was held may be gained from one or two contemporary 
opinions. Thus Webbe in his Discourse of English Poetry, 
1586, comparing the achievements of the ancients with modern 
writers, says: 

Among whom I think there is none that will gainsay, but Master 
John Lyly hath deserved most high commendations, as he which 
hath stepped one step further therein than any either before or since 
he first began the witty discourse of his Euphues. Whose works, 
surely in respect of his singular eloquence and grave composition of 
apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make trial 
thereof thorough all the parts of rhetoric, in fit phrases, in pithy sen- 
tences, in gallant tropes, in flowing speech, in plain sense and surely, in 
my judgment, I think he will yield him that verdict, which Quintillian 
giveth of both the best orators Demosthenes and Tully, that from 
the one, nothing may be taken away, to the other, nothing may be 
added. 

Again and again we find Lyly's praises sung by his contem- 
poraries with but few dissenting voices. As late as 1633 the 
publisher of Lyly's collected plays exclaims: "Our nation 
are in his debt, for a new English which he taught them. 
Euphues and his England began first that language. All our 
ladies were then his scholars, and that beauty in court, which 
could not parley Euphuism, was as little regarded as she 
which now there speaks not French." 

The volume which so took the English world of its day 
by storm is a love story of the slenderest possible construction 



36 THE NEW CULTIVATED PROSE 

in which is told the adventures in England and elsewhere of 
Euphues, a young Athenian gentleman of wealth and position, 
thus offering the greatest possible number of opportunities 
for conversation, argument, and satirical comment on topics 
most of them of contemporary interest and moment. The plot, 
such as it is, hardly moves at all, and little or no characteriza- 
tion is attempted. It is neither for plot nor character that 
Euphues was written; except so far as these things are neces- 
sary to serve as the foundations on which to construct fine 
dialogue, rhetorical speeches, and moral discourses. But a 
distinction must be drawn between the first part, Euphues, 
the Anatomy of Wit, which is in the main a philosophical essay 
addressed to gentlemen and students, and Euphues and his 
England, in which the author appeals directly "To the Ladies 
and Gentlewomen of England," declaring that ^'Euphues 
would rather lie shut in a lady's casket than open in a scholar's 
study"; and that "there shall be nothing found that may 
offend the chaste mind with unseemly terms and uncleanly 
talk." The second part of Euphues is therefore much less 
satirical and more interested in the refinements of choice 
society, more concerned with the intricacies of polite love- 
making and the repartee of smart conversation among gentle- 
men and gentlewomen. While neither a book of essays, — much 
less of philosopy, — a book of deportment and polite conduct, 
nor a story in any wise worked out as to plot or character, 
it is yet not altogether extravagant to say that in Euphues we 
have the earliest important piece of English fiction, the slender 
beginnings of that sea of writing realistic and romantic in 
which the modern reader finds his solace and his delight. 
As M. Jusserand has pointed out, with Euphues commences 
in England the literature of the drawing-room 

And yet it is remarkable how, in its many aspects, Lyly's 
work has been understood and misunderstood. Charles 
Kingsley called it, not without justice," as brave, righteous, and 
pious a book as a man need look into"; and the year 1900 
saw it abused in print as "a piece of square-toed, finical 
vacuity," whatever that may mean. The most complete 
failure to represent Euphues and Euphuism — though we may 



EUPHUISM 37 

say with Dr. Horace Howard Furness, "it stabs, to couple 
this word with that great and dear memory" — was Sir Walter 
Scott's in his character of Sir Percie Shafton in The Monastery. 
As to Euphuism the word is constantly misused/ although 
the subject has been now so thoroughly discussed that there 
is no excuse for any misunderstanding. 

Euphuism is a rhetorical prose style. It is concerned 
neither with the choice of subject-matter nor with vocabulary. 
Hence the common use of the word to denote a florid and 
poetic style, the chief features of which are foreign and far- 
fetched words, is indefensible. Euphuism is concerned 
wholly with grammatical structure and syntax, and its purpose V.^ 
is the inducement of an artificial emphasis by means of an- 
tithesis and repetition in sentence form and relation. Its 
sentences are elaborate in their antithetical or parallel 
structure, they are balanced and pointed, and constructively 
as symmetrical as possible. The means used to produce all 
this is complicated and yet not unreducible to certain very 
definite categories. In the first place, Lyly is very fond of 
oratorical question and response, a device too familiar to need 
illustration. Secondly, he employs figurative language in a 
deliberately artificial manner, often taking familiar natural 
objects and stringing them together in similitudes, all illus- 
trating the same point. For example: "As therefore the 
sweetest rose hath his prickle, the finest velvet his brack, the 
fairest flower his bran, so the sharpest wit hath his wanton 
will, and the holiest l^ead his wicke,d way." Again, Lyly 
carried to excess the fondness of his age for allusion to classi- 
cal and mythical history, revelling with delight in that redis- 
covered world in a true spirit of the Renaissance. Thus he 
asks: "Did not Giges cut Candaules' coat by his own meas- 
ure ? Did not Paris, though he were a welcome guest to 
Menelaus, serve his host a slippery prank.?" Opening his 
book at random, we find Diogenes, Pythagoras, Socrates, 

^ See especially Mr. Courthope's perverse employment of the 
word in connection with poetry. The authoritative monograph on 
the topic is that of C. G. Child, 'John Lyly and Euphuism, Miin- 
chener Beitrdge, vii, 1 894. 



38 THE NEW CULTIVATED PROSE 

Plato, Milo, Lycurgus, Lacedemonians, and Thessalians all on 
one page. Scarcely less pervasive and excessive are the 
figures and illustrations which Lyly derives from nature per- 
verted, what has been dubbed Lyly's "unnatural natural 
history." "It is like to fare with thee as with the eagle, 
which dieth neither for age nor with sickness, but with famine, 
for although thy stomach hunger yet thy heart will not suffer 
thee to eat." "I have read, that the bull being tied to the 
fig-tree, loseth his strength; that the whole herd of deer stand 
at the gaze, if they smell a sweet apple; that the dolphin by 
the sound of music is brought to the shore." No trick of Lyly 
has called forth so much ridicule as this; but is it much more 
unnatural than our own contemporary "animal story," which, 
under guise of an accurate chronicle of nature (to which Lyly 
made no pretense) ascribes to the beasts of the fields and the 
,,^ prairies manlike qualities of thought and reasoned action 

y*^ ;, which would do credit to the talking dragons and diabolical 

werewolves of the dark ages ? 

But more distinctive than all these artificial similitudes 
and illustrations is Lyly's equally deliberate employment of 
certain devices for rhetorical emphasis. Alliteration, which 
is the correspondence of the initial sound of words otherwise 
dissimilar, is as old as the language. As is universally known, 
it was a chief distinguishing trait of Old English verse, and it 
remains one of the graces of modern English poetry. Lyly 
makes use of this familiar device in the subtlest possible 
manner, simply, continuously, transversely. He plays with 
words of like sound or similar sound, producing what is tech- 
nically know as assonance and annomination, and employs 
' all this to emphasize and ornament a larger likeness of clause 

and phrase. 

Cast not your eyes on the beauty of women, lest ye cast away 
your hearts with folly; let not that fond love, wherewith youth fatteth 
himself as fat as a fool infect you; fot as a sinew, being cut, though it 
be healed, there will always remain a scar; or as fine Hnen stained with 
black ink, though it be washed never so often, will have an iron mole: 
so the mind once mangled or maimed with love, though it be never 
so well cured with reason, or cooled by wisdom, yet there will appear 



EUPHUISTIC LITERATURE 39 

a scar, by the which one may guess the mind hath been pierced and 
a blemish whereby one may judge the heart hath been stained. 

Here the whole passage Is balanced and antithetical as are 
equally its various members; it begins with a play on words 
(^cast not your eyes, cast away your hearts); alliteration is 
present in "fatteth himself fat as z fool," "mind once maimed 
and mangled," "cured with reason, cooled with wisdom," 
where the antithical words reason and wisdom chime, as well 
as cured and cooled. Lastly parisonic antithesis is'illustrated 
in the "mind maimed with love, cured with reason, cooled by 
wisdom"; whilst the Euphuistic similitudes are pervasive, 
albeit we are for once spared a piece of unnatural nature lore. 
In a word, Lyly uses alliteration continuously or transversely 
for ornament to mark parallel or antithesis. All of these 
devices are more or less constantly present in Lyly's earlier 
prose whether in Euphues or in his dramas. 

Euphuism was not the invention of Lyly, although most 
highly developed in his hands. It is a style of marked and 
unmistakable character discoverable in English literature as 
early as 1532, reaching its height between 1579 and 1590, 
and continuing even beyond that in Lyly's imitators. Ascham 
and his contemporaries were chiefly engaged in writing clearly, 
although Ascham himself employs antithesis with effect. In 
1557 appeared North's Dial of Princes. In this book is found 
an occasional use of parisonic balance, simple alliteration, 
and figurative allusions in argumentative illustrations. This, 
North seems to have derived in part from a French transla- 
tion of the works of Antonio de Guevara, a Spanish writer of 
history and familiar letters whose Epistolce Aurece enjoyed 
great reputation in the reign of Henry VIII, and was trans- 
lated into English early in Elizabeth's reign. In 1577 ap- 
peared a book entitled Pettie his Palace of Pleasure, 3. collection 
of stories translated from the French. The style of this work 
retains and augments the peculiarities already noted in North, 
and adds allusions to fabulous natural history and the device 
of oratorical question and response, thus anticipating Lyly 
in every one of the characteristics of Euphuism. What Lyly 
did then was to heighten these devices and maintain their 



40 THE NEW CULTIVATED PROSE 

quality. This, added to the sententious force and persuasive 
morality of his book, gave it its success. That this was not 
due alone to its style is proved by its superior popularity over 
Pettie's book. Euphues reached a tw^elfth edition in the year 
1636, and then was left unreprinted until 1868 

The vogue of Euphues called forth a swarm of imitators, 
and the new literature of the boudoir was thus launched in 
England once and for all. M. Jusserand in his scholarly and 
entertaining work, The English Novel in the Time of Shake- 
speare, tells how the word "Euphues" was played on in the 
titles of books. There was Zelauto, the Fountain of Fame, 
."containing a delicate disputation . . . given for 
a friendly entertainment to Euphues," by Anthony Munday, 
1580; there was Euphues his Censure to Philautus, 1587, and 
Menaphon, Camilla's Alarm to slumbering Euphues, two years 
later, both by Robert Greene, poet, dramatist, pamphleteer, 
and enemy of Shakespeare. There was Rosalynd, Euphues 
Golden Legacy by Thomas Lodge, 1590, delightful original 
of As Tou Like It; and Arishas, Euphues amidst his Slum- 
bers by John Dickenson, 1594. But far more than the title 
oi Euphues was followed in Barnabe Riche's Don Simonides, 
1 58 1, who travels abroad like Euphues and then comes to 
England to meet Philautus, Euphues' friend in Lyly's story. 
In Zelauto, likewise, a gentleman of station comes, after 
other travel, to view "the happy estate of England," and learn 
"how a worthy princess governed their commonwealth." 
Other books more or less in Lyly's manner were Melbancke's 
Philotimus, 1 583, Warner's Pan his Syrinx, 1584, and 
Emanuel Ford's popular Parismus, 1598, with further like 
stories by Munday, Lodge, Greene, and others. 

Although the earlier of these productions make a deter- 
mined effort to imitate the artificialities and mannerisms of 
Lyly's style, few succeeded to any degree; and they certainly 
added nothing to the devices for emphasis and other rhetorical 
niceties for which Lyly must always stand notoriously emi- 
nent among writers of EngHsh prose. Greene made almost no 
^ use of such features of Euphuism as its fabulous natural his- 
tory, and he carried its other mannerisms to no inordinate 



SIDNEY'S "ARCADIA" 41 

length. Thomas Nash's vigorous and vernacular English 
lent itself -with, difficulty for a passing moment to a style so 
alien to his own. Lodge is the most confirmed of the Euphu- 
ists after the master himself; but in the best of Lodge's v^^ork, 
as for example his Rosalynd, the story and the characters have 
taken a place of importance — as they do likewise in the best 
fiction of Greene — which clarifies the Euphuistic manner and 
marks a step forward in the history of English fiction as well 
as in English prose. In a word, no follower of Lyly was so 
purely a rhetorician as he, and no one wrote his story so un- 
abashedly for its moral and the opportunities which it offered 
to discourse at large. By the year 1590, Euphuism had nearly 
worked itself out, later prose preserving only "its spirit of 
scrupulous neatness . . . with an occasional use of bal- 
anced antithesis and alliteration." Even Lyly's own work — 
we have only prose plays from which to judge — shows a 
gradual abandonment of his favorite devices in the interest 
of a purer and less conscious style. 

Next to the mistakes about Euphuism, the commonest 
misapprehension as to Elizabethan prose is that which groups 
the prose of Sidney's Arcadia with that of Lyly. It is said 
that every educated man carries about with him a definition 
of poetry of his own making and adoration. Without raising 
a question, more difficult to lay than a ghost, one thing may be 
affirmed: whatever poetry may be, it is never rhetoric; and 
where rhetoric abides and rules, poetry is not. Not only is 
Euphues not poetic, but Lyly's plays are poetry neither in 
form nor in spirit; and they owe their success to much the 
qualities that distinguish his other prose. The late Mr. Hen- 
ley went even further, to deny to Lyly's dainty little verses, 
"Cupid and my Campaspe played at cards for kisses," the 
title of a lyric and to class it with epigrams. The essence of 
Sidney's work is his poetry; as Professor Dowden less fittingly 
said of Shelley, "his life, deeds, and words all sang together"; 
and the Arcadia in its nature, conduct, style, and impetus is the 
complete and permanent antithesis of Euphues and Euphuism. 
Nor need we qualify this statement, remembering Sidney's 
experiments in exotic poetical forms and the extraordinary 



^ 



42 THE NEW CULTIVATED PROSE 

part which he played in introducing the "conceit" into English 
poetry, any more than we need doubt the sincerity of any true 
art because its methods are ornate and ingenious. 

The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, as Sir Philip called 
his romance, was written during his retirement in partial dis- 
grace with the queen, in 1580. It was addressed to his intimate 
friends, dedicated to his sister, and never intended for publi- 
cation. It remained in manuscript some years after Sidney's 
death, but was fortunately not destroyed as he had intended. 
In 1590 a piratical edition appeared and fourteen other edi- 
tions followed within a century. The Arcadia was thus one 
of the most popular stories of the age, and the parent, like 
Euphues, of a long line of prose romances. It was translated 
into foreign languages and used as material for other writings 
at home. The underplot of King Lear, to mention only one 
example, is derived from an episode of the Arcadia, that of 
the blind king of Paphlagonia, and a dozen other plays levied 
upon it. 

The Arcadia is more a heroic romance than a pastoral. 
The pastoral atmosphere of the earlier parts is not maintained. 
As to material, Sidney's story is the very opposite of Euphues, 
being rich in event, stirring in adventure, and full of imagina- 
tion, sentiment, and poetry. The main Story relates the for- 
tunes and adventures of two young princes, who disguise them- 
selves, the one as an Amazon, the other as a shepherd, to win 
the love of two fair princesses. The heroines are the daughters 
of Basilius, a king whose caution for their welfare and future 
causes him to remove his court to a country lodge. The course 
of the story is much entangled and full of glorious and romantic 
adventure, it is diversified with no less than seven episodes 
each of them a completely wrought story, and the end is left 
to the reader's imagination, as the whole is unfinished. Thus 
not only the style but the content of the Arcadia is poeti- 
cal. It was one of the prime theories of Sidney that it was spirit 
and not form which made poetry. He says: "It is not riming 
and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown 
maketh an advocate." And elsewhere: Verse is "but an 
ornament and no cause to poetry: sith there have been many 



ARCADIANISM 43 

most excellent poets that never versified, and nov7 swarm many- 
versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets." In 
view of such ideas we must expect to find a close relation in 
Sidney's Arcadia between the subject-matter and the form of 
expression. Arcadianism is then not only a prose style, but 
a variety of the art of fiction. Sidney's aim is the "feigning 
notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delight- 
ful teaching which must be the right describing note to know 
a poet by." Arcadianism is an emotional medium for the 
expression of lofty and heroic thought. If we consider it on 
the side of mere style, the diction of the Arcadia is what we 
might expect of a scholar and a courtier. It is thoroughly 
English and remarkably free from words which have since 
become obsolete. Compound words are not frequent and 
poetical words can not be considered a feature. The salient 
characteristics of the Arcadian style are its habitual employ- 
ment of bold and natural imagery for plain and direct speech, 
in the extreme degenerating into conceit; the use of antithesis 
with accompanying alliteration, balance, and iteration to give 
emphasis to thought and feeling; and the general employment 
of a loose and cumulative structure of sentence. It was no 
vain boast of the age to declare that Sidney had reclaimed 
English prose from the excesses of the cultivated style. The 
influence of the Arcadia was more permanent than that of 
Euphuism, if less easy accurately to trace; for Sidney's "bold 
feigning of notable images," even his striking and original 
"conceits," fell in with the spirit of a poetical and imaginative 
age as no rhetorician's studied devices could hope to do. But 
who can deny the permanent value to literature of these con- 
sistent and thorough experiments in the art of writing elegant 
prose ? From the leading-strings of an outworn tongue, from 
the precedents and unchallenged usages of "Tully," Euphues — ? 
led writers to a contemplation of the niceties and elegancies 
of vernacular English and taught them the possibilities of their 
own tongue. Nor was this education confined alone to the 
writers of books. The beauty and clarity of the diction of 
Elizabethan letters, even of documents, not too much clogged 
by contact with the law, has often been remarked. Some of 



44 THE NEW CULTIVATED PROSE 

the queen's own English letters show a grace and feeling for 
the phrase which we may be sure, with all Elizabeth's natural 
endowments, came not wholly unstudied. 

It was a fortunate day for English literature that both in 
verse and in prose it should so happily have passed the age of 
experiment. What Sidney did for foreign meters in English 
verse, Lyly accomplished for English prose. Sidney proved 
that although we might compass the hexameter, the sapphic, 
the canzon, or the madrigal in English, it would be better to 
be true to the genius and spirit of English verse. Lyly showed 
the possibihties of a highly organized and rhetorical style in 
prose; but, living longer than Sidney, withdrew from its ex- 
cesses himself when he saw growing up about him a vigorous 
/and idiomatic English speech alike removed from the pedantry 
of Latinism and the affectations of courtly preciosity. But 
the lesson that Lyly had to impart once learned, it was in the 
nature of the Elizabethan spirit to revert to the more spon- 
vtaneous, the more flowing and imaginative prose of Sidney 
and to prefer the fine abandon of his tumultuous eloquence to 
the nice devices of Lyly's ingenious invention. It was Mat- 
thew Arnold's stricture on English prose at large, that it is a 
prose in which the imagination has been too busy, and the 
rational faculty not busy enough. This criticism finds its 
earliest justification in the prose of Sidney which chose rhet- 
oric for its antithesis, not for its example. It was Lyly who 
was dainty, artificial, allegorical, the rhetorician of finished art 
and studied phrase, The limit of such literary art is the 
epigram and beyond this it can not attain. Sidney, in con- 
trast to all this, is natural; although of a strong artistic bent, 
romantic in temper, seeking literature as an outlet to feeling, 
not as an art to be loved only for its own sake: the goal of such 
art is lyricism. And in lyricism the barrier between prose and 
poetry, wherever you erect it, is once and for all broken down. 



CHAPTER IV 
SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

*''' I ""HIS place have I purposely reserved for one," wrote 
-■■ William Webbe in 1586, "who if not only, yet in my 
judgment principally, deserveth the title of the rightest Eng- 
lish poet that ever I read. That is the author of The Shep- 
herds^ Calendar^ intituled to the worthy Master Philip Sidney, 
whether it was Master Spenser or what rare scholar of Pem- 
broke Hall soever ... I force not greatly to set down. 
Sorry I am that I can not find none other with whom I might 
couple him in this catalogue in his rare gift of poetry." And 
even earlier, in his entertaining "gloss" to the Calendar, "E. 
K.," the poet's friend, had declared: "I doubt not so soon as 
his name shall come to the knowledge of men and his worthi- 
ness be sounded in the trump of fame but that he shall . . 
be . . . beloved of all, embraced of the most and won- 
dered at of the best." Seldom has a poet so leaped with a 
bound as did Spenser into the esteem and appreciation of his 
countrymen; and even more rarely has such a feat been 
accomplished by the means of an art so singularly ideal and 
free from the transient qualities that commonly make for im- 
mediate poetic repute. 

In the Prothalamion, Spenser has recorded London as 
the place of his birth and nurture. His father's family was 
of northeast Lancashire, numerous and respected there and 
elsewhere. Thus Spenser's connections were good and he 
was born, if humbly for his station, a gentleman. The year 
of his birth was 1552, and he was one of several children. He 
was educated at the Merchant Tailors' School, then newly 
founded and under the head-master, Richard Mulcaster, a 
man neither unknown to the history of education nor to that 
of the drama. The future dramatists, Kyd and Lodge, were 
among his schoolmates. Spenser was the recipient of bounty 

45 



46 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

granted "to certain poor scholars of the schools about 
London," and went up to Cambridge, matriculating as a sizar 
— a term equivalent to servitor at Oxford — at Pembroke 
College, in May, 1569. 

But Spenser had appeared in print even before he v^ent 
to Cambridge. The Theater of Voluptuous Worldings, 1569, 
is the translation of a moral tract, originally in Flemish prose 
and the vi^ork of one John van der Noodt. It wzs translated 
first into French and then into English. Prefixed were a score 
of woodcuts illustrating certain poems of Petrarch and Du 
Bellay and portraying matter more or less relevant to the moral 
tract. Four of these poems, translations of Du Bellay into 
unrimed decasyllabic fines, have been assigned to Spenser, 
because in a collection of poems, avowedly his, published in 
159 1, they reappear under the title. Complaints, with certain 
revisions. 

Spenser's works disclose that he acquired at college not 
only a competent knowledge of the classics but a very consid- 
erable acquaintance with French and Itafian poetry. As to 
authors in his own tongue, he accepted Chaucer above all 
as an inspiration and example; although Spenser's temper- 
ament and his ideals of art were vastly in contrast with the 
robuster genius of the father of English poetry. Spenser's 
interest in Skelton is less easy to explain, although the poet in 
Skelton is discoverable to him who will seek the tiny sweet 
kernel within the thick and bitter rind. Among Spenser's 
intimates at the University was Gabriel Harvey, the adviser 
of the Areopagus, a man who must have had somewhat in him 
above mere pedantry to have inspired Spenser's affection. 
Edward Kirke, too, soon to introduce to the public The Shep- 
herds' Calendar, must have been close to the poet in these 
early days. John Still, once alleged the author of Gammer 
Gurtons Needle, and Thomas Preston, the author of that 
extraordinary hotch-potch of moral, history, farce, and tragedy, 
Cambyses, were both of them contemporary with Spenser at 
Cambridge. But we know nothing of any intimacy of Spenser 
with them. Nash and Marlowe were to come a decade later. 
Spenser was not a very healthy young man; and he left 



EARLY POETICAL VENTURES 47 

college, after taking his mastership in 1576, going to live with 
his own people in Lancashire. It was there that he met and 
loved the young woman celebrated in his pastorals as Rosalind. 
Aubrey's story that Rosalind was a kinswoman of Sir Erasmus 
Dryden, the grandfather of the great poet, may be dismissed; 
and a more recent identification of the lady with one Rose 
Dyneley, at least provisionally, accepted. Whatever the truth, 
it is certain that this Rosalind preferred another, not Spenser, 
for her Orlando, and that some charming and plaintive poetry 
was the result. 

The circumstances of Spenser's coming up to London to 
seek his fortune are not altogether clear. Through his associ- 
ation with Harvey or through some unknown recommendation, 
he gained an introduction to Sidney and a place in the house- 
hold of the Earl of Leicester about 1578. Between this and 
1580, Spenser appears to have traveled on the continent, per- 
haps as far as Rome, and also into Ireland on services for the 
earl. These were the days of growing friendship with Sidney, 
who loved all poets, and of the Areopagus and the letters inter- 
changed between Harvey and Spenser relative to the new clas- 
sical measures in English. Spenser seems to have experimented, 
like Sidney, with hexameters and other ancient forms of verse. 
We hear also of nine comedies, called after the Muses and 
written after the manner of Ariosto, of a poem entitled Dreams, 
prepared for the press with a comment by Kirke, and of,a prose 
tract. The English Poet, apparently in the nature of Sidney's 
Defense of Poesy. But all have been irretrievably lost. Several 
other poems are believed to have been recast into parts of The 
Faery Queen and other extant poems. In December, 1579, 
The Shepherds' Calendar was entered at the Stationers' Com- 
pany. The Faery Queen, likewise, must have been well under 
way before Spenser left the protection of Leicester in 1580. 

It is a remarkable example of the confidence of genius that 
Spenser should deliberately have set himself against several 
of the fashions of his day, notwithstanding that he was more 
or less affected by them. Although his natural affinities were 
with Harvey and the classicists, Spenser's good sense and mu- 
sical ear saved him from the absurdities of the attempt to in- 



48 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

troduce classic meters into English. But it was not only from 
pedantry that he rescued himself. Though full of the spirit 
of the Italian Renaissance in its larger embodiments as repre- 
sented in the epics of Tasso and Ariosto, Spenser had little in 
common with the Italianated style that dealt in "dainty an- 
tithesis and alliteration, ingenuity of simile," and far-fetched 
comparison. Spenser held "the laboriously small literature" 
of Italy in undisguised disdain. In consequence of this feeling 
he even dared to employ at times Chaucer's obsolete language 
in protest against the foreign words which were at the moment 
crowding into English. Other motives, too, led Spenser to a 
love of antiquated expressions. There is a charm about the 
unusual, especially in sound, which the ear of Spenser, attuned 
to musical impressions, found it difficult to resist. Unques- 
tionably Spenser abused at times his mastery over language 
and, though he rarely invented new words, he frequently dis- 
torted old ones. It has been held that many of his alleged 
archaisms are really referable to actual provincial usage in the 
Lancashire of his day, and that more of them may be otherwise 
justified. But when all has been said, Spenser must be ac- 
knowledged much of a tyrant over words, twisting and con- 
torting, at times, his pitiable subjects at his royal will. In 
this Spenser differed immeasurably from Shakespeare who ex- 
tended a beneficent rule over thousands of subjects in the world 
of speech that had remained hitherto unreduced to citizenship 
in the realm of literary acceptance. 

The Shepherds' Calendar, "containing twelve allegories 
proportionable to the twelve months," was registered in De- 
cember, 1579, dedicated "to the noble and virtuous gentleman, 
most worthy of all titles both of learning and chivalry, Master 
Philip Sidney," and modestly signed "Immerito." The Dedi- 
catory Epistle to Harvey was written by E. K., that is Edward 
Kirke, Spenser's friend at college, who also supplied the quaint 
"gloss" or running comment that accompanies the text. The 
Shepherds' Calendar is the first successful attempt to write 
poetical pastoral eclogues in English. Spenser appears to have 
found his inspiration in the pastorals of Battista Spagnuoli, 
commonly known as Mantuan, one of the foremost Latin poets 



"THE SHEPHERDS' CALENDAR" 49 

of the Italian Renaissance, and in those of Clement Marot, 
a French reHgious free-lance who was alternately in favor and 
exiled from the courts of Marguerite d'Alen^on and Francis I. 
But the pastoral mode had already crept into England in 
Alexander Barclay's satirical and allusive Eclogues, 1513, and 
in those of Barnabe Googe, 1563, who, as well as Turberville, 
had translated pastorals of Mantuan into English; while long 
before the Scottish poet, Robert Henryson, had set a standard 
of idyllic excellence in his perfect little poem, Robyn and 
Makyne (albeit likewise of French extraction), which none 
was to equal save Marlowe, Breton, and Lodge in times to 
come. 

Notwithstanding that The Shepherds^ Calendar is thus 
imitative of foreign poets, written in a mode which seems 
strained and artificial to us to-day, and weighted by a conserv- 
ative adherence to an archaic vocabulary and an obsolete 
system of rhythm in parts, the poem was an immediate success, 
and Spenser was enthusiastically hailed as "the new poet" 
in a chorus of praise. Spenser lived to see five editions of the 
Calendar. It was translated into Latin by John Dove in 1585, 
and commended by critics like Webbe and Nash, by personal 
friends such as Sidney, and fellow poets like Drayton. And 
indeed in the Calendar we recognize at once the presence of a 
consummate artist, a powerful grasp of ideas, a pictorial and 
vivid style, and an extraordinary power over metrical form in 
calling forth the music of the language. Already we find 
Spenser's fondness for allegory asserting itself in the person- 
ages of these eclogues. Colin is Spenser himself; Hobbinol, 
his friend Harvey; Menalcas, the fortunate rival of the poet 
for the hand of Rosalind. 

But The Shepherds' Calendar is more than a set of eclogues 
on amorous and trifling subjects. It contains underneath a 
thin disguise of pastoral form, a deep undercurrent of sturdy 
and independent opinion. For example Archbishop Grindal, 
as the wise shepherd Algrind, receives Spenser's unstinted 
praise. Grindal had set himself in opposition to the court 
in an attempt to educate and liberalize the clergy, and had 
manfully refused to yield to the queen on what he considered 



50 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

a question of conscience. It was a brave thing for the young 
poet, awaiting preferment, to speak so boldly as he did on the 
side of liberality and justice. This conduct was of a piece 
with the candor of Spenser's later satire of the courtly delay 
and corruption of the time which he voices in his excellent 
satirical poem. Mother Huhherd's Tale, and elsewhere. 

The Shepherds' Calendar and the Arcadia set the pastoral 
fashion, and thereafter this became for a decade or more the 
prevailing literary mode. This mode was common to verse 
and prose, to the epic, dramatic, and lyric form, and it mingled 
with every other conceivable manner of writing which the teem- 
ing inventivenesss of an age that doted on originality could 
bring forth. The Arcadia had contained pastoral lyrics; but 
the lyrics of The Shepherds' Calendar may have preceded them. 
It is somewhat strange that Spenser should never have written 
pastoral or other lyric for itself. The "Song to Eliza," "Peri- 
got and Willie's Roundelay," and the majestic "Lament for 
Dido," all included in their variety of beautiful meters in the 
Calendar, disclose how varied and perfect was Spenser's 
lyrical art. Yet in them all, as in the glorious poetry of the 
Prothalamion and the Epithalarnion, we have the large and 
leisurely poetical utterance so distinctive of Spenser. Spenser 
has none of the brevity, the concentration, the concrete expres- 
siveness, the short holding phrase that distinguishes the best 
of Elizabethan lyrists. Rarely can he catch with the instinct 
of some lesser men the fleeting joy or sorrow of the moment. 
Spenser's Muse is like some stately galleon of the age, built 
high above the water, bearing on in stately course, her bil- 
lowy sails all set and gay with a thousand floating pennons. 
She needs the broad ocean for her course, but she is a gallant 
sight to behold, and little pinnaces shrink before her regal 
progress. 

In July, 1580, Spenser was appointed secretary to Arthur 
Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and accompanied 
him to Dublin. Although Spenser returned to England for 
two brief visits, Ireland thenceforth became his home, until 
the rebellion drove him back to London as a refuge shortly 
before his death. The successive posts and employments in 



LIFE IN IRELAND 51 

the service of the government held by Spenser we need not 
detail here. He was for some years Clerk of Chancery (1581- 
1588), and later clerk of the Council of Munster (1588-1594). 
He was well paid for his services to the crown, and acquired 
at different times a considerable landed estate, living, amongst 
other places, at New Abbey in county Kildare, and at Kil- 
colman Castle, near to Doneraile in county Cork. Nor was 
Spenser without associates in Ireland. There were then as 
now many cultivated gentlemen on what may be called the 
civil list of the colonial office. One Lodowick Bryskett, a 
fellow Irish official, became an intimate friend of Spenser's. 
Bryskett was of Italian extraction, and had traveled on the 
continent as the companion of Sidney. His Discourse of Civil 
Life, 1606, the translation of an Italian philosophical work, 
has a peculiar interest from his description in it of a party of 
literary friends who met at his cottage near Dublin, chief 
among them Spenser. Here Bryskett tells how Spenser en- 
couraged him "long sithence to follow the reading of the Greek 
tongue, and offered me his help to make me understand it"; 
how he requested Spenser to discourse to the party of moral 
philosophy . . . "whereby virtues are to be distin- 
guished from vices"; and how Spenser excused himself on the 
plea that he had already undertaken "a work tending to the 
same effect." Another intimacy, the outcome of Spenser's 
life in Ireland, was the friendship of Walter Raleigh, the 
"Shepherd of the Ocean" of Colin Clout. Raleigh lived not 
far from Spenser and visited him at Castle Kilcolman. To 
him on one of these visits Spenser submitted the first three 
books of the The Faery Queen; and Raleigh, delighted with 
the work, induced Spenser to return to England to seek a 
publisher. This Spenser did, arriving in London in October, 
1589, about the time that Shakespeare was beginning his 
apprenticeship to the stage. All this matter and Spenser's 
own delight in the gracious reception which he met at court 
from Cynthia and her maids is charmingly, allegorically, and 
pastorally set forth in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, printed 
in 1595. Spenser arranged for the publication of the first 
three books of The Faery Queen, and in 1590 they appeared 



52 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

with the dignified and graceful dedication to Queen Elizabeth, 
the well-known prefatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh de- 
claring the intention of the author, and numerous sonnets to 
illustrious people who had shown favor to the poet. 

Spenser's literary triumph was all that he could wish; but 
he did not succeed in getting employment which would remove 
him from savage Ireland and bring him nearer the court. He, 
too, experienced the delays and doubts of attendance on royal 
favor. According to a well-known anecdote Elizabeth was so 
pleased with The Faery Queen — as well she might be, for 
never has woman been so royally flattered — that she deter- 
mined to give Spenser a pension of five hundred pounds per 
annum, a large and munificent gift, considering the purchasing 
value of money in that age. But Burleigh demurred that so 
much money should be paid for a song. The queen then told 
her thrifty secretary to give Spenser what in his judgment he 
thought was fit for a poet, and the pension was granted at 
fifty pounds. This is the basis of the notion that Spenser 
was poet laureate. The ofiice did not exist in Spenser's day, 
nor in Daniel's, the unofficial successor of Spenser to the favors 
of the court. Ben Jmison^ was^xbejfirst^^^^^^ 

In a well-known passage of Colin Clout, Spenser touches 
on his poetical contemporaries with generous appreciative 
comment. Each poet is veiled, after the fashion of the time, 
under a pastoral name, and among them Spenser certainly 
mentions Alabaster, Churchyard, Raleigh, Daniel, Sidney, 
and some minor writers, while the surmises of scholars have 
considerably extended the list of identifications. The whole 
passage concludes: 

And there, though last not least, is ^tion, 
A gentler shepherd may no where be found: 
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention, 
Dbth like himself heroically sound. 
All these, and many others moe, remain, 
Now after Astrophel is dead and gone: 
But while as Astrophel did live and reign, 
Amongst all these was none his paragon. 



"COLIN CLOUT" 53 

All these do flourish in their sundry kind, 
And do their Cynthia immortal make: 
Yet found I liking in her royal mind, 
Not for my skill, but for that shepherd's sake. 

Astrophel is of course Sidney whose memory Spenser every- 
where reveres. It was becoming and courtier-like in Spenser 
thus to attribute the royal recognition to his friendship with 
Sidney and not to his own poetic merit. As to ^tion, the 
adjective "gentle" in this passage immediately suggests 
Shakespeare. We may not always remember that the epithet 
is Jonson's, to be found with a dozen other good things about 
the great dramatist in the famous lines prefixed to the first 
folio edition of Shakespeare's works. "Gentle" is now once 
and for all the Shakespearean epithet, and the heroically 
sounding Muse of this passage has been applied to him (Shake- 
speare). But it has also been applied to Sack-ville; and it is 
equally applicable to Rowland, the self-assumed pseudonym 
of Michael Drayton, a poet who must have been well known 
to Spenser in 1595. It must be confessed that Shakespeare 
— a player and only on sufferance acquainted with men of 
Spenser's court circle — was certainly unlikely to be so ad- 
dressed by "the new poet" in the year 1595, the year after the 
earliest heir of Shakespeare's invention had seen the press. 
And yet the two greatest poets of the age may have met. If 
they did into what insignificance fall the royal fields of cloth of 
gold and other ceremonious meetings of august worldly sov- 
ereigns. Did Spenser find "our Shakespeare" truly gentle? 
And was Spenser to Shakespeare the "poet's poet?" 

In 1590 appeared Daphnaida, an elegy on Lady Douglas, 
and a volume entitled Complaints. Strange as it must seem 
to us, some of the matter of Muiopotmos, an allegorical story 
of the proud butterfly swept into a spider's web, and the satiri- 
cal beast epic. Mother Huhherd's Tale gave offense, and part 
of the work was suppressed. The publishers, promise of an- 
other volume of small poems was never fulfilled. 

In 1592 Spenser fell in love once more and wooed and won 
for his wife Elizabeth Boyle, a woman of position and culti- 



54 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

vatlon, well worthy of the poet's addresses. Spenser's beauti- 
ful sonnet sequence, Amoretti, is, in part at least, the poetical 
record of this courtship. The Epithalamion which celebrated 
his marriage, in June, 1594, has been truly described as "one 
of the grandest lyrics in English poetry." These two works 
were printed in 1595, as was Colin Clout; and at the close of 
this year Spenser brought three more books of The Faery Queen 
to London and they appeared the next year. Once more was 
Spenser received by the best people of England, staying at 
Essex House with the earl, and penning the fine Prothalamion 
for a double wedding held there. Spenser was also engaged 
during this visit in writing his prose tract, A View of the Present 
State of Ireland, This clear and able paper of state is marred 
by its attitude which allows no rights to the down-trodden 
Irish. The gentle and kindly poet was one of the English 
invaders that approved and even took part in the raids of 
devastation that wasted unhappy Ireland. He was also one 
of those who was rewarded with the confiscated estates of 
rebels, a reward which was to bring to him a speedy and ter- 
rible retribution. In an examination of the social culture and 
civilization of the reign of Elizabeth we must not forget that 
much of the last was as yet superficial. Bear-baiting and bull- 
baiting were no uncommon amusements, to say nothing of 
cock-fighting, in praise of which worthy Roger Ascham wrote 
a book, unhappily now lost. Those who delight in what they 
choose to call historical "realism," have been at pains to tell 
us how Queen Elizabeth used to beat her maids of honor, and 
how she actually boxed my Lord of Essex on the ears one day 
when she was scolding him, a chastisement which the young 
coxcomb doubtless richly deserved. Add to this the habit of 
public execution, drawing and quartering, and the exhibition 
of heads and mangled limbs on the parapet of London Bridge, 
and we have illustrations alike of the childish petulance of the 
queen and of the brutality of the age. 

In Elizabeth's day the Irish were little better than savages. 
They had been given no opportunity to become civilized, 
and were not eager to seize one. They continued, as they 
have to our own day, the objects of the injustice and rapacity 



CONTEMPORARY REPUTE 55 

of their more powerful neighbor. To Spenser, Ireland was 
a horrible but beautiful wilderness, whose beauties and his 
own loneliness among them he both celebrates and deplores. 
He detested the Irish as an inferior race. Neither his age 
nor his position could make his judgment in this matter fair. 
As a man we know Spenser to have been kindly, gentle, and 
estimable, with few of the weaknesses vulgarly attributed to 
poets. It is no small credit to the taste of the Elizabethan age 
that their contemporaries gave to Shakespeare and to Spenser 
that rank to which it was left to comparatively modern appreci- 
ation to restore them. Spenser was as highly honored by the 
queen as could be expected, considering his birth and the fact 
that he exhibited no very marked political qualifications. 
As to his flattery of her, it was a mere fabric of imaginative 
gallantry and devotion, the result of a grateful and loyal nature. 
How manly after all, is his greatest piece of flattery, the dedica- 
tion of The Faery Queen, and what a glorious assumption of 
eq.uality it conveys: "To the most high, mighty, and magnifi- 
cent empress, renowned for piety, virtue and all gracious 
government Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, 
France, and Ireland, and of Virginia, Defender of the faith, 
her most humble servant, Edmund Spenser, doth in all humil- 
ity dedicate, present, and consecrate these his labors to live 
with the eternity of her fame. " 

In 1597 Spenser returned to Ireland in failing health. 
He was appointed sheriff^ of Cork; and in the year following, 
the Tyrone Rebellion broke out. The English were taken 
unawares, massacre and outrage followed. In October of 
that year Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burnt, and Spenser 
fled to Cork with his wife and four children. According to 
Jonson, one of his children perished in the flames. In 
December Spenser came to London, the bearer of dispatches 
from Sir Thomas Norris, governor of Munster, and died at 
an inn in Westminster the next month, January, 1599. The 
tradition goes that he died in poverty. It seems improbable, 
however, that the holder of a crown pension and bearer of 
official dispatches, so well known and honored as Spenser, 
should so have perished. He was ruined in a sense by the 



56 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

destruction of his Irish castle and the spoiling of his estate. 
This is the origin of the story. Spenser's funeral was sump- 
tuous, and attended by the poets and the nobility. He was 
buried in Westminster Abbey near to Chaucer. 

And now as to Spenser's famous book. The Faery Queen. 
Fortunately for our understanding of its scope and meaning, 
we have Spenser's own interesting letter to Raleigh. Therein 
we learn that The Faery Queen is "a continued allegory or 
dark conceit," and that "the general end thereof . . . is to 
fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle 
discipline." 

Which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, 
being colored with an historical fiction, the which the most part of 
men delight to read rather for variety of matter than for profit of 
the ensample, I chose the history of King Arthur, as most fit for the 
excellency of his person, being made famous by many men's former 
works, and also furthest from the danger of envy and suspicion of 
present time. 

After naming as his examples Homer, Vergil, Tasso, and 
Ariosto, Spenser continues: 

By ensample of which excellent poets, I labor to portray in Arthur, 
before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve 
private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised; the which is the 
purpose of these first twelve books, which if I find to be well accepted, 
I may be perhaps encouraged to frame the other part of politic vir- 
tues in his person after that he came to be king. 

Then follows a justification of the allegorical method and 
an explanation of how Arthur saw "in a dream or vision the 
Faery Queen^ with whose excellent beauty ravished, he 
awaking, resolved to seek her out; and so being by Merlin 
armed, he went to seek her forth in faery land. " 

In that Faery Queen I mean glory in my general intention, but 
in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of 
our sovereign the queen and her kingdom in faery land. And yet, 
in some places else I do otherwise shadow her. For considering she 
beareth two persons, the one of a most royal queen or empress, the 
other of a most virtuous and beautiful lady,' this latter part in some 



"THE FAERY QUEEN" 57 

places I do express in Belphcebe, fashioning her name according to 
your own excellent conceit of Cynthia, Phoebe and Cynthia being 
both names of Diana. 

It will thus be seen how this elaborate plan carries out 
the idea, already suggested in Spenser's words to Lodowick 
Bryskett "to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to 
every virtue a knight to be the patron and defender of the 
same, in whose actions and feats of arms and chivalry the 
operations of that virtue whereof he is the protector are to 
be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose 
themselves against the same to be beaten dowil and overcome. " 
This stupendous plan was never completed. The six finished 
books give the legend (each in twelve cantos, averaging fifty 
or sixty stanzas each) of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, 
Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy; while a fragment of two 
"Cantos on Mutability" is supposed to have belonged to 
a seventh book (not necessarily seventh in order) on Con- 
stancy, The legend that The Faery Queen was actually 
finished may be dismissed as improbable. The poem as it 
stands contains about four thousand stanzas, or between 
thirty and forty thousand verses, and is of a quality of sus- 
tained poetical excellence, unequaled in any other poem of 
the language. 

As The Faery Queen remains to us, it is like some fragment 
of ancient sculpture, the more beautiful from its incomplete- 
ness. However, such is its exquisite detail and such its chain- 
like quality of unity in continuance, that it is probable that 
we are not much the losers by this. Indeed, with all its 
elaborate plan. The Faery Queen must be pronounced one of 
the most plotless epics in. existence. Moreover the narrative, 
despite its graces and variety, is repetitious, if continuous; 
and whether we "prick o'er the plain" with the Knight of 
Holiness, descend with Sir Guyon to the caves of Mammon, 
or follow Sir Arthegal's aquatic duel with the Paynim PoUente, 
again and again recur the seemly images of knightly prowess, 
the brave encounters, the contrasted braggadocio or caitiff 
knights, the fair disconsolate virgins, Una-like, and the Vivian- 
like Duessas, all-seeming fair but foul within. I never read 



58 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

^;- The Faery Queen without thinking of those rare and costly 
1/ tapestries which decked in ancient days the halls of princes. 
■ f Here is the same soft richness of color and of texture, the 
h^ > '"^' ^^"^ remoteness to anything like actual life, the delicate care 
\ ii*- of detail, and the same enchanting decorative effect. Of 
'^'■" such art we feel that it is loving and leisurely; its very progress 

is like that of the shuttle in the loom, now forward, now back. 
Neither weaver nor poet can be conceived as hurried or as 
otherwise than content to add, hour after hour and thread 
after thread, the beautiful colors that grow insensibly into a 
pattern, ever recurrent and conventional, but ever holding, 
as with a soft compulsion, our approval and affection. Take 
these stanzas, some three of many more, descriptive of Bel- 
phoebe, type of virgin perfection and sufficiency: 
Eftsoon, there stepped forth 
A goodly lady clad in hunter's weed, 
That seem'd to be a woman of great worth. 
And by her stately portance born of heavenly birth. 

Her face so fair, as flesh it seemed not. 
But heavenly portrait of bright angel's hue, 
Clear as the sky, withouten blame or blot, 
Through goodly mixture of complexions due; 
And in her cheeks the vermeil red did shew 
Like roses in a bed of lilies shed. 
The which ambrosial odors from them threw, 
And gazer's sense with double pleasure fed, 
Able to heal the sick and to revive the dead. 

In her fair eyes two living lamps did flame. 
Kindled above in th' Heavenly Maker's light, 
And darted fiery beams out of the same, 
So passing piersant, and so wondrous bright. 
In them the blinded god his lustful fire 
To kindle oft essayed, but had no might; 
For with dread majesty and awful ire. 
She broke his wanton darts. and quenched base desire. 

Her ivory forehead, full of bounty brave. 
Like a broad table did itself dispread, 
For love his lofty triumphs to engrave. 
And write the battles of his great godhead: 



"THE FAERY QUEEN" 59 

All good and honor might therein be read; 
For there their dwelling was. And when she spake, 
Sweet words, like dropping honey, she did shed; 
And 'twixt the pearls and rubies softly brake 
A silver sound that heavenly music seemed to make. 

No wonder that it was once profanely said that nothing 
but Spenser's death could possibly have prevented The Faery 
Queen from going on in the same bloom, fragrance, and vital- 
ity forever. 

Two allegories underlie the story of The Faery Queen, one 
figuring forth abstract virtues and religious qualitites, the 
other the concrete presentation of the same. Thus the Red- 
Cross Knight of the first book signifies Holiness in the abstract. 
In the concrete this figure stands, somewhat unfittingly, for 
the Earl of Leicester. Belphoebe, the Virgin Warrior, is 
militant Chastity in the abstract; but, like all unwedded and 
feminine abstractions of the age, in the concrete is Queen 
Elizabeth. The allegory of The Faery Queen is sometimes 
moral, sometimes political, sometimes religious and even 
personal, although there can be no doubt that Spenser not 
infrequently avoided the possibility of too close an identifica- 
tion. With this uncertainty as to Spenser's personages. 
The Faery Queen has been most happily compared to a wide 
landscape, viewed from a point of vantage on one of those days 
w^hen, although the heavens are fair, the mist is driving in 
from time to time from the sea. As you look out over the 
plain, you see some village, apparently familiar; but before 
you identify the spire on its church, down sweeps the mist 
and the baffling semi-luminous cloud covers all. In the read- 
ing of the poetry of Spenser we may well follow the witty 
suggestion of one of his fellow poets. "Poetry," says Sir 
John Harington, "is one kind of meat to feed divers tastes. 
For the weaker capacities will feed themselves with the pleas- 
antness of the history and the sweetness of the verse; some 
that have stronger stomachs will, as it were, take a further 
taste of the moral sense; and a third sort, more high conceited 
than they, will digest the allegory. " 

Nothing is more erroneous than to suppose that Spenser 



6o SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

borrowed his perfect stanza of The Faery Queen from the 
Itahan. The sonnet and the famous ottava rima {ah a h ah 
c c) were both used by Spenser and may have suggested, be- 
tween them, the advantage of a long and well-knit stanza. 
A more likely original than either of these is to be found in 
Chaucer's rime royal (a h a b h c c), used in Troilus and 
Cress ide especially, which by the insertion of a line (a h ah h c h c) 
between the last two verses becomes Chaucer's stanza of 
The Monk's Tale. One step more, the addition of the final 
alexandrine, and we have the Spenserian stanza {a h ah h c 
h c c). But this step was a great and original one, and takes 
Spenser's stanza out of the group of "five stress" verses, 
giving it a character entirely new. The Spenserian stanza 
is Spenser's own, and is certainly to be regarded as one of 
the happiest inventions in formal versification. Its adapta- 
tion, moreover, to the style and subject of The Faery Queen 
is perfect; for the Spenserian stanza combines the advantage 
of a beautiful integral form, of sufficient scope to admit every 
variety of cadence, with the unusual additional faculty of 
linking well stanza to stanza. It is therefore an admirable 
form for a continuous narrative, made up of successive vi- 
gnettes; and has very properly been likened to a broad and 
beautiful river, flowing in graceful curves with a "steady, 
soft, irresistible sweep forwards. " The extraordinary smooth- 
ness of Spenser's versification further justifies this comparison 
together with the agreeable recurrence of the rime, so cadenced 
as not too strongly to mark the end of each verse. The final 
alexandrine is inexpressibly beautiful, seeming as it does to 
round up each stanza with a graceful retardo, and, by its 
excess over the other lines, to break the monotony of the 
succession of decasyllables : 

Nought under heaven so strongly doth allure 
The sense of man, and all his mind possess, 
As beauty's lovely bait, that doth procure 
Great warriors oft their rigor to repress, 
And mighty hands forget their manliness; 



THE SPENSERIAN STANZA 6i 

Drawn with the power of an heart-throbbing eye, 
And wrapped in fetters of a golden tress, 
That can with melting pleasance mollify 
Their hardened hearts enured to blood and cruelty. 

So whilom learned that mighty Jewish swain. 
Each of whose locks did match a man in might, 
To lay his spoils before his leman's train: 
So also did that great (Etean Knight 
For his love's sake his lion's skin undight; 
And so did warlike Antony neglect 
The world's whole rule for Cleopatra's sight. 
Such wondrous power hath women's fair aspect 
To captive men, and make them all the world reject. 

The Spenserian stanza is really less monotonous than blank- 
verse, even with Milton, in all his varied powers, as its ex- 
ponent, to say nothing of stanzas, ending in a couplet and 
shorter quatrains. Many poets have tried to improve Spen- 
ser's stanza; none have succeeded either in writing it more 
gracefully than Spenser or in inventing a better. The Spen- 
serian stanza is technically an extremely difficult one, both 
from its length, the intricacy of the rime, and the necessity 
of long sustained excellence. Spenser accomplished all these 
technical demands with an ease that must remain the despair 
of all his imitators. 

The paradox of Spenser's genius lies in his combination 
in harmonious union of a passionate love of the sensuously 
beautiful with the purest and sternest ethical spirit of his 
time. This it is that makes Spenser alike the poet of the 
Renaissance and the poet of the Reformation. The com- 
bination of these apparently repugnant elements is exem- 
plified to a still higher degree in Milton, the poet who owes 
most to Spenser. We must say "apparently repugnant 
elements," for it is assuredly no essential of the flower of 
art that it spring from the ofFal of sensuality and irreligion, 
nor of purity in morals and religion that all that is bright and 
joyous in the world be held in contempt. It is this union of 
the elements of beauty with moral truth that gives Spenser 
a poetic dignity such as Tennyson enjoyed in our own day. 



62 SPENSER, "THE NEW POET" 

Spenser, like Tennyson, is one of the greatest pictorial artists 
in words, and a consummate craftsman in the handling of 
that varied succession of sounds and qualities of tone in which 
the technique of verse consists. But Spenser is, in a sense, 
the last of the medieval poets. With all the decorative glory 
of the Renaissance his' own, its imagery, its power to compel 
words to the expression of ideas, the figure beneath all this 
elaboration often discloses the hard angular lines of didactic 
allegory. It is not Spenser's truth to nature nor his insight into 
human life and conduct, his sense of design, nor his ability to 
tell a connected story that makes him great. For, if the truth 
be confessed, he has none of these things in unusual measure, 
and we scarcely remember a character or an episode in his 
great epic, or, if we do, it leaves the impression of an agreeable 
arabesque in which the design was pleasing for color and 
graceful of curve, but not memorable or distinctive, nor in- 
deed at all times comprehensible. Spenser's mind was in 
full sympathy with the strong, refining, and ennobling in- 
fluences of the age which produced Sidney, the first English 
gentleman. Its loyalty, its spirit of adventure, its sensitive- 
ness and delicacy of sentiment, all found an echo in his poetry, 
toned with a deep and fervent religious sense that has the 
effect of sanctifying the melodious words in which he conveyed 
his pure and beautiful thoughts. The saving grace of Spenser 
is first his devotion to the beautiful, which no Keats nor 
Shelley more profoundly worshipped; and, secondly his lofty 
moral impulse, involving an ideal code of conduct for man 
and a devout faith in good. In Spenser the worship of the 
beautiful did not breed the passion of disappointment which 
it bred in Keats, nor the defiant revolutionary attitude to 
which it impelled Shelley; although the moral impulse of 
Spenser, no less than that of Shelley, was a reforming impulse. 
But where Shelley was revolutionary, and at times vituperative 
of the tyrants, the dungeons, and wrongs of suffering humanity, 
Spenser sought ever to reform by an appeal to the uplifting 
effects of calm and exquisitely wrought poetry and by dwelling 
with the passion and insistence of a lover on the beauty of 
holiness. 



CHAPTER V 

LYLY AND THE DRAMA AT COURT 

THE accession of Queen Elizabeth found England with- 
out a genuine drama. The old sacred plays that had 
flourished all over England, in the ports and market towns, 
even in boroughs and rural villages, were extinct or, where 
lingering, moribund. The new drama of art was not, as yet. 
True, the reigns of Henry, Edward, and Mary abounded in 
interludes, moral, educational, religious, and, above all, con- 
troversial. Moreover John He)Avood, first name on the hon- 
orable role of English dramatists, had amused the court of 
Henry VHI with witty and free-spoken interludes; and in 
them for the first time unmistakably, the artistic process was 
set loose, and English drama absolved from its ancient intent 
to guide, edify, and instruct. The interludes of He)nvood are 
as French as the sonnet of Wyatt is Italian. But the difference 
between Respuhlica, a controversial morality written to incul- 
cate Roman Catholic principles, or King Johan, a contro- 
versial morahty written to intrench Protestant prejudice, and 
the interludes of Heywood, is the difference between preaching 
and literature, a difference from the point of view of art com- 
parable alone to that between midnight and daylight 

A contrast has been suggested between the medieval ballad 
and the courtly lyric of art which found its way into England 
in the days of Henry VHI; and the origins of modern English 
poetry and much else have been found in the select court 
circle, the coterie, which emulated the cultivation of the better 
small courts of Italy. A similar antithesis exists between the 
old sacred drama and the new regular drama of the reign of 
Elizabeth. The old drama was, as all know, first clerical in that 
the priests were the earliest actors and promoters of it, just as 
the drama itself was in its essence a form of worship. Soon 
all this was changed and the drama, once secularized, fell into 

63 



64 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

the hands of the trade guilds and became bourgeois and the 
care of the citizens of towns. A popular nature inhered in the 
old sacred drama almost to the end, notwithstanding that both 
morality and interlude were often employed as entertainments 
at court, in the schools, and in the universities themselves. 
The new regular drama, then, was separated from the past 
not only in its character as an amusement and an art; but, 
in its quality as a product of the literature of the court, it was 
equally in contrast with the old popular drama of the citizens. 
The earliest Elizabethan dramatists were scholars, gentlemen, 
and courtiers; then came the school-masters and semi-profes- 
sional poets; lastly, the actors as playwrights and the pro- 
fessional dramatists. Elizabethan drama originated at court, 
in the universities, and among the young lawyers of the Inns 
of Court; it progressed to the schools and singing choirs and 
thence to the inn-yards and taverns of London. 

The familiar story tells how Nicholas Udall, sometime 
head-master, first of Eton and then of Westminster School, 
wrote the earliest English Comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, in 
the reign of King Edward or earlier; how it was written in 
imitation of the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus and acted by the 
boys of his school in place of the usual Latin play at Christmas; 
but it is sometimes forgotten that Udall was not only a school- 
master but a professional playwright who devised pageants 
for the coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn and dramatic per- 
formances for Queen Mary. Of William Stevenson, author 
of another of the earliest regular English comedies. Gammer 
Gurton's Needle, we know very little. This was a university 
play and may have been acted as early as 1560. Its author- 
ship was long ascribed to Bishop Still, then given to John 
Bridges, and now settled as Stevenson's. Gammer Gurton is 
modeled on the interludes of Heywood, and tells in plain and 
very vernacular language how a whole village is set by the ears 
by the loss of a needle and the chicanery of a mischievous 
rascal known as Diccon of Bedlam. Ralph Roister Doister 
is a more decorous play if less vigorous and is concerned with 
the foolish and presumptuous suit of Ralph, a vain braggart, 
for the hand of the merry but virtuous Dame Custance. The 



PLAUTUS AND SENECA 65 

power of both comedies is in their honest representation of 
actual life. 

On the other hand, romance came into regular dramatic 
form in tragedy and at the hands of Thomas Sackville and 
Thomas Norton, two young students of the Inner Temple; 
and the name of their play was Gorhoduc or Ferrex and Porrex. 
Here the model was Seneca, the moralist and philosopher of 
Neronian Rome, though the story was borrowed from that 
mythical lore which Englishmen of the day included in the 
history of their country. Gorboduc was king of England. 
Like Lear he unwisely divided his kingdom before his death 
between his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, a procedure which 
ended in the destruction of all. Now this tale resembles that 
of the sons of King (Edipus of Thebes who likewise divided a 
kingdom and fought to the death over it; and this tragedy 
Seneca treated in his Phcenissce, whence in all probability its 
attraction for the young English students of law. Gorhoduc 
was acted before Queen Elizabeth in January, 1561, and is 
memorable alike as the first regular English tragedy and as 
the first play to be written in English blank-verse. 

Plautus and Seneca continued favorite models with Eng- 
lish dramatists throughout the entire reign and for diverse 
reasons. Plautus is genuinely clever and, despite all his bur- 
lesque and farce, a dramatist of repute; English comedy could 
have found no better model, limited though his subjects are, 
and tending, though his characters do, to types. Seneca, on 
the contrary, was only the most available model for tragedy. 
His plays were not even intended for acting; and their florid 
rhetoric, moralized commonplaces, and exaggerated horrors 
were but a crude example to young English tragedy. More- 
over it was a mistaken idea of the usages of the ancients as 
exemplified in Seneca that long kept Italian tragedy, and after 
it that of France, in classical leading-strings to the detriment 
of the highest art. It is impossible here to mention the many 
plays that followed on these various models; suffice it to say 
that from the sixties onward the drama flourished steadily, 
furnishing many notable examples. Thus, Gascoigne followed 
Gorhoduc, a few years after, with a Senecan tragedy Jocasta, 



66 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

and adapted from the Italian of Dolci a comedy called 
Supposes whence Shakespeare had a part of his Taming of the 
Shrew. In the seventies Robert Wilmot rewrote a play (origi- 
nally by himself and others) called Tancred and Gismunda, 
a romantic tragedy levying on Italian rather than classical 
sources. Whetstone, much about the same time, wrote his 
Promos and Cassandra whence Shakespeare derived his grave 
comedy, Measure for Measure. A play on the story of Romeo 
and Juliet is alluded to as "lately set forth on stage," two 
years before Shakespeare was born. And an interlude of 
The Cruel Debtor, registered four years later, may not impos- 
sibly be an earlier version of a play called The Jew, wherein 
Gosson tells us was depicted "the greediness of worldly 
choosers (Portia's unsuccessful suitors) and bloody minds of 
usurers (Shylock's implacable pursuit of Antonio)." In 
nothing are we more apt to mistake than in the supposition 
that Shakespeare was identified with the beginnings of English 
drama. The drama in a general sense was at least three hun- 
dred and fifty years old when Shakespeare began to write, and 
plays of the type of his own had long been popular before he 
was out of his boyhood. 

The history of the drama up to the coming of the Armada 
is bound up with the tastes and the fashions of the court. In 
view of the centralized power of the Tudors and the formation 
about the person of the sovereign of a brilliant and cultivated 
court, the personal character of the monarch came more and 
more to affect society and the literature and art which mir- 
rored it. Whatever may be said of the fickleness and men- 
dacity, the doubles and turns, of her Macchiavellian politics, 
Queen Elizabeth must have been a remarkable woman as well 
as a magnificent and august sovereign to have inspired in men 
of gravity and wisdom, as well as in those of more elastic tem- 
per, those emotions of mingled loyalty and gallantry which 
glow in nearly all who knew. her personally, and which may 
be regarded as one of the most admirable testimonies to her 
fortunate reign. Elizabeth had acquired many courtly Italian 
accomplishments to gloss, if not to refine, a genuine English 
spirit which was by no means lacking in coarseness. Dis- 



ELIZABETHAN PLAYERS 67 

liking religious feeling and mistrusting sectarian zeal, Eliza- 
beth had inherited a love of form and pageantry, which latter 
had flourished with masking at her father's court. These 
traits resulted in the royal encouragement of ceremonials, 
functions, and amusements, the drama among the rest. As 
a consequence the office of the revels, to which fell the super- 
vision of plays and the allowance of their performance, was 
increased in importance, entertainments were constantly de- 
vised for the court and for the royal progresses, and the taste 
for such things, growing on what it fed, soon demanded the 
services of professional actors and playwrights. 

The actors of the time of Elizabeth were of several classes. 
There were first the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, of the 
universities, occasionally the courtiers themselves; these were 
all non-professionals. There were, secondly, the boys of the 
public schools and the singing schools attached to the royal 
chapels and to the cathedral of St. Paul's. These soon be- 
came practically professionals. Lastly, there were the adult 
professional actors, a class at first held in great contempt and 
often verily little better than vagabonds, but destined, as time 
went on, to claim among its numbers such actors as Burbage, 
AUeyn, and Shakespeare, men who retired honored and rich 
from the profession which their talents had graced. 

The plays of Sackville and Gascoigne are occasional plays. 
They were acted by amateur actors and staged by the authors 
themselves. But amateur performances could not long con- 
tent the cultivated and critical audiences that gathered about 
the queen; and the professional actor soon emerged in answer 
to the demand for better music and finer histrionic art. Dur- 
ing the first two decades of the reign nearly a dozen names of 
school-masters and choir-masters who were likewise the man- 
agers of theatrical companies, appear. Among them was 
Richard Edwards, Master of the Chapel between 1561 and 
1567 and the author of an extant play called Damon and 
Pythias, and a lost Palcemon and Arcyte, on the theme of 
Chaucer's Knight's Tal.e and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. 
To Richard Bower, predecessor of Edwards, has been assigned 
Appius and Virginia, an indiff'erent production still extant. 



68 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

Edwards' successor also, William Hunnis, was pamphleteer, 
musician, poet, playwright, and manager as well. To Hunnis 
have been credited no less than thirteen plays, performed at 
court between 1567 and 1582; but no one of them remains 
extant. The early traffic with the stage of Sebastian Wescott 
of Paul's, of Richard Ferrant of Windsor, of John Taylor and 
WiUiam Elderton of Westminster, and Richard Mulcaster of 
the Merchant Tailors' School remains even more doubtful 
and shadowy. But the nature of the plays that they staged 
is sufficiently known. Such were the anonymous Queen 
Hester and Horestes. In the former the subject and treat- 
ment of the old sacred drama persist. The latter is a naive 
and preposterous popularization of the old Greek story of 
Orestes. Camhyses by Thomas Preston, fellow of King's 
College, Cambridge, in 1564, where and when his play was 
acted before the queen, long remained the butt of contemporary 
ridicule for its bombast and extravagant rant, attracting again 
and again the pungent satire of Shakespeare. 

The new professional actors, trained by masters such as 
Edwards and Hunnis, were the pupils of the great schools, 
Eton and Westminster, or the boys who sang in the choirs of 
the royal chapel or of the cathedral of St. Paul's. This 
custom of training choir-boys to entertain the court and the 
nobility extends back into very early times. It soon became 
mixed with a custom of different origin, the performance in the 
schools on festival occasions of classical plays for the practice in 
Latin involved. For the better service, moreover, of the royal 
chapels, it had long been customary to issue letters patent, 
permitting choir-masters to take good voices for training to 
the royal service, a power which was soon abused. For the 
choir-master was thus converted into a theatrical manager 
and added an eager pursuit of popular favor to his former duty 
as purveyor of entertainment to the court. In 1597 one 
Nathaniel Giles, then master of the chapel, under a commission 
of this kind, actually kidnapped boys on their way to school 
and delivered them over to Henry Evans, who had just taken 
a lease from James Burbage of the newly renovated Black- 
friars' Theater. According to the complaint of Henry Clifton, 



JOHN LYLY 69 

the father of one of these boys, to the Star Chamber, the chil- 
dren were restrained in their liberty and compelled to learn 
their parts at the point of the rod. Clifton's son was released; 
but seven other boys, whose names appear in this complaint, 
remained in this servitude, indubitably with the connivance 
if not the approbation of the queen's council. Indeed it has 
recently been affirmed that the status of this troupe of the 
Children of the Chapel Royal acting at Blackfriars was that 
of a company under the direct patronage of the queen, estab- 
lished not only with her knowledge but carrying out her will.^ 
Certain it is that this company became a very important one, 
playing many of the most difficult and successful plays of the 
age; and that it continued at the Blackfriars under the later 
name of the Children of the Queen's Revels until the lease of 
that theater was resumed by Shakespeare and Burbage's com- 
pany in 1609. The boy companies continued throughout 
the reign of Queen Elizabeth powerful rivals even of the best 
professional actors, though they were not infrequently "in- 
hibited," as the term went, for indulging in satire and other 
abuses, and were at last practically suppressed. 

The most interesting person whose career as a playwright 
falls among the school-master and choir-master managers is 
John Lyly. Born within a year of Spenser, Lyly was thus 
ten years Shakespeare's senior. From College, he removed to 
court to enjoy the patronage of Burleigh and the Earl of Ox- 
ford, for whom he appears at one time to have managed a com- 
pany of players. The publication of his novel, Euphues, in 
1579, as we have seen, brought Lyly an immediate and, for 
his time, an extraordinary reputation; and a second part, in 
the following year, confirmed it. Lyly was possessed of an 
ambition to hold a post in the office of the revels, for which 
he v^as better fitted than any man in England. But notwith- 
standing recent affirmations to the effect that Lyly became in 
1585 the Clerk Controller of the Revels, besides holding the 
post of the Vice Master of the Children of St. Paul's, neither of 
these statements can be substantiated. Lyly was at one time 

^ See C. W. Wallace, in Nebraska University Studies, 1908, viii, 
240 ff. 



70 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

a member of Parliament and a writer in the contemporary 
prose of controversy, but his tastes naturally turned him to 
the drama and to the devising of entertainments for the court. 

Eight comedies remain to attest the dramatic activity of 
Lyly which was confined for the most part within the decade 
of the eighties. All of them, except one, deal in a manner both 
fanciful and romantic with material ultimately of classical 
derivation; and three are commonly supposed to conceal an 
allegorical significance underneath a seemingly mythological 
story. Thus Endimion and Sappho and Phao are alleged to 
figure forth intrigues within the intimate circle that surrounded 
her majesty, the latter alluding especially to the visit of the Due 
d'Alen^on and his offer for Elizabeth's hand; whilst Midas, 
the foolish Phrygian king in whose grasping hand all things 
were turned to gold, alludes to England's arch enemy. King 
Philip of Spain. The remaining plays seem devoid of alle- 
gorical design. Among them, Campaspe tells the story of 
Alexander's infatuation for the fair Theban captive of that 
name and his magnanimous release of her affections to the 
painter Apelles. Interspersed as it is with the humors of 
Diogenes in his intercourse with Alexander and the philos- 
ophers, the whole is a pleasing comedy and it deserves the 
praise which it has received as a love tale well told. Mother 
Bomhie reverts to a closer following of the method of Roman 
comedy, dealing in a well-constructed and clever plot with 
the familiar situation of children exchanged in infancy, and 
parents the dupes of clever and intriguing servants. Gala- 
thea. Lovers Metamorphosis, and The Woman in the Moon 
are best described under the general designation of pastoral 
comedies of a mythological type. The last alone is written 
in verse. All contain some allegory, but it is in none of these 
cases as complete as that of Endimion or Midas, and may be 
suspected as intended to convey little more than the customary 
"concealed" compliment to the queen. Except for Lovers 
Metamorphosis, all the comedies of Lyly are relieved by farcical 
scenes usually sustained by pages and servants. But few of 
his comedies are wanting in topics of serious gravity. 

Endimion remains by far the most interesting of the dramas 



LYLY'S "ENDIMION" 71 

of Lyly, alike for its intrinsic qualities and for the circum- 
stance that it is most typical of the style and method of its 
author. The allegory, too, of Endimion is elaborately con- 
ceived and carried out with ingenuity and address. This has 
given rise to many theories and surmises among scholars in 
vi^hich the date of the presentation of the play is involved and 
its relations to certain intrigues of the intimate court circle of 
Elizabeth is affirmed and denied. This drama, w^hich is 
otherwise called The Man in the Moon, is based on the well- 
known classical myth of the sleep of Endimion on the slopes 
of Mount Latmus and of the goddess Diana, enamored of him 
and impulsively awakening him by her kiss. Obviously if 
this myth was to be applied in any wise to the queen — and it 
appears to have been impossible for any Elizabethan poet to 
name Diana, Cynthia, Semele, or any other mythical virgin 
without such an allusion — some change must be made in the 
story. Lyly therefore represented the kiss as a boon extorted 
only after entreaty and as a sovereign condescension free from 
the slightest taint of an earthly affection. It is Endimion who 
is enamored, not Cynthia, the queen; and his affection is of 
the nature of that reverent adoration of beauty in womanhood 
which has long been recognized as one of the distinctive "notes" 
of Renaissance poetry. It has been customary to interpret 
the allegory of this play, Hke that of The Faery Queen, as of a 
double intent, the one abstract and relating to the contrasts 
of the love inspired by heavenly and earthly beauty, love, free 
or tainted with amorous desire, the other concrete, referring 
to actual persons, their relations and intrigues. Not only is 
Cynthia the queen, but Endimion is the Earl of Leicester. 
TelluSjthe earth and foil to the goddess, the moon, is either the 
Countess of Sheffield or Mary Queen of Scots; and the minor 
personages fall more or less into their places according as we 
interpret the events of the whole play as referring to Elizabeth's 
discovery, in 1579, of Leicester's marriage with the Countess 
of Essex through the French ambassador, M. de Simier, or 
prefer the more recent interpretation that places the play at 
1585 and refers the allegory to the historical duel of Elizabeth 
with Mary of Scotland. It is but fair to say that recently a 



72 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

protest has been raised against these concrete historical in- 
terpretations of Endimion; Lyly's comedy has been studied 
anew and the whole allegory referred to the abstractions of 
the contrasts and relations of heavenly and earthly beauty as 
set forth in the conventionalized fashion of contemporary love- 
making.^ To this we may give a qualified assent, remember- 
ing, however, that inconsistency in its conduct and denial by 
the author can be urged as no real objections to allegory in any 
age, and that it was peculiarly the nature of English allegory 
in Lyly's time to conceal a concrete as well as an abstract 
significance. 

While no author can be judged as a dramatist by short 
extracts, the following may suffice to show the quality of Lyly's 
refined and Euphuistic diction as well as the nature of his 
allegorical flattery of the queen in this play. 

Endimion. O fair Cynthia, why do others term thee unconstant, 
whom I have ever found unmovable ? Injurious time, corrupt 
manners, unkind men, who finding a constancy not to be matched in 
my sweet mistress, have christened her with the name of wavering, 
waxing and waning. Is she inconstant that keepeth a settled course, 
which since her first creation altereth not one minute in her moving ? 
There is nothing thought more admirable or commendable in the sea 
than the ebbing and flowing; and shall the moon, from whom the sea 
taketh this virtue, be accounted fickle for increasing and decreasing ? 
Flowers in their buds are nothing worth till they be blown; nor 
blossoms accounted till they be ripe fruit; and shall we then say they 
be changeable for that they grow from seeds to leaves, from leaves to 
buds, from buds to their perfection ? . . . Tell me, Eumenides, 
what is he that having a mistress of ripe years and infinite virtues, 
great honors and unspeakable beauty, but would wish that she might 
grow tender again ? getting youth by years and never decaying beauty 
by time; whose fair face neither the summer's blaze can scorch nor 
winter's blast chap, nor the numbering of years breed altering of 
colors. Such is my sweet Cynthia, whom time can not touch because 
she is divine, nor will ofi^end because she is delicate. O Cynthia, if 
thou shouldst always continue at thy fulness, both gods and men would 
conspire to ravish thee. But thou to abate the pride of our afi'ections 

* See P. W. Long in Publications of the Modern Language Asso- 
ciation, xxiv, 1909. 



GEORGE PEELE 73 

dost detract from thy perfections; thinking it suflScient if once in a 
month we enjoy a glimpse of thy majesty; and then to increase our 
griefs thou dost decrease thy gleams, coming out of thy royal robes, 
wherewith thou dazzlest our eyes, down into thy swathe clouts, be- 
guiling our eyes; and then — 

Eumenides. Stay there, Endimion, thou that commitest idolatry 
wilt straight blaspheme, if thou be suffered. Sleep would do thee 
more good than speech: the moon heareth thee not, or if she do, 
regardeth thee not. 

When all has been said, Lyiy's Endimion remains a bril- 
liant piece of court comedy, skilfully constructed and ad- 
mirably sustained. The transition from Horestes and Cam- 
hyses to Endimion is the transition from the botching of the 
tyro to the professional touch of the artist. True it is that 
these court plays of Lyly are rhetorical and decorative, super- 
ficial and limited in any appeal to the modern reader by 
reason of their occasional nature; none the less his contribu- 
tions to the drama are tangible and definite. It was Lyly 
who gave to English comedy ease of dialogue and natural 
witty retort; who gave to drama likewise fluency and finish of 
style. He drew for the first time portraits of the cultivated 
men and women of his day in the easy intercourse of good 
society, and he restrained exorbitant medieval allegory to a 
modest and subsidiary place. He was inventive, too, and 
happy in uniting the diverse classical and other elements out 
of which he fashioned his plays. Indeed it may be aflSrmed 
that he is the superior of many of his successors in these as in 
some other qualities of his art. It was an innovation in 
Lyly to write his plays — all except one — in prose, and it 
is not to be denied that his prose, Euphuistic though it is in 
some of his earlier productions, is wanting neither in idiomatic 
force and effectiveness nor in grace and elegance. In a 
word, it was Lyly who raised the entertainments of the court 
from the haphazard of amateurishness to a professional 
standard, giving to the drama for the first time artistic form 
and unity. 

Lyiy's earliest rival at court was George Peele, whose 
first drama, The Arraignment of Paris, was acted before the 



74 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

queen between 1581 and 1584. Peele, son of the clerk of 
Christ's Hospital, was educated there and at Oxford, where 
his interest in the drama seems to have been inspired by a 
kinsman, William Wager, the author of several Latin plays. 
In these plays Peele appeared as an actor and he is related to 
have translated while at college one of the Iphigenias of 
Euripides, but whether into English or into Latin remams 
uncertain. From college Peele went to court, where the slender 
patronage he mustered could not have carried him far. Before 
long he gravitated to the popular stage then occupied by 
Wilson and Tarlton. Peele led a riotous and Bohemian 
life and became a peg, so to speak, on which to hang knavish 
stories and worse. Possessed as he was at times of no mean 
lyrical gift, Peele is imitative and eclectic in the drama and 
constantly follows in the wake of others. Thus his Arraign- 
ment of Paris is a clear effort to outdo Lyly in his own court 
drama and a bid for the patronage of the court; his Battle 
of Alcazar frankly imitates Marlowe's Tamhurlaine; his 
Edward I is an inferior chronicle play, disfigured by an at- 
tempt to gain momentary popularity by a gross misrepresenta- 
tion of one of the Spanish-born queens of England; and his 
David and Bethsabe is an ill-advised if poetical revival of the 
Bible play in the guise of a chronical history. Peele seems to 
have been possessed of an uncontrollable bias towards bur- 
lesque; for on this ground alone can we explain his Old Wives 
Tale in which the absurdities and extravagances of old romance 
are ridiculed with delightful effect. Locrine, which belongs 
to the same source m mythical British history as King Lear, 
is an extravagant attempt to popularize Senecan blood and 
horror on the public stage. Although never avowed by Peele 
as his, it seems almost unquestionably of his authorship, 
and is perhaps truly read as a take-off on other like produc- 
tions of his time. Peele's work must all have been written 
while Lyly was still active, for he died prematurely, in 1597, 
worn out by disease and a dissolute life. 

Peele's Arraignment of Paris is a dramatic version of the 
old myth of CEnone's unhappy love for Paris combined with 
his award of the golden apple of Ate to Venus on her promise 



THE "ARRAIGNMENT OF PARIS" 75 

to bestow on him the most beautiful woman in the world. 
But Peele at this point adapted mythology to the exigencies 
of a graceful flattery of royalty, borrowing his idea from an 
old poem addressed to the queen by Gascoigne some half- 
dozen years before. Paris, on complaint of Juno and Pallas 
to Jove, is summoned to attend an action "entered in the 
court of heaven." The parties meet at "Diana's bower," 
and so equal are the claims of all three that Jove is perplexed 
until Apollo suggests: 

Refer this sentence where it doth belong: 
In this, say I, fair Phcebe hath the wrong; 
Not that I mean her beauty bears the prize, 
But that the holy law of heaven denies 
One god to meddle in another's power; 
And this befell so near Diana's bower, 
As for th' appeasing this unpleasant grudge. 
In my conceit she hight the fittest judge. 

Diana accepts the duty of deciding, and, having sworn each 
god and goddess to obedience, declares : 

There wons within these pleasant shady woods 
Where neither storm nor sun's distemperature 
Have power to hurt by cruel heat or cold, 

a gracious nymph, 

That honors Dian for her chastity. 

And likes the labors well of Phoebe's groves; 

The place Elizium hight, and of the place 

Her name that governs there Eliza is; 

A kingdom that may well compare with mine. 

An ancient seat of kings, a second Troy, 

Y-compassed round with a commodious sea: 



She giveth laws of justice and of peace; 

And on her head, as fits her fortune best, 

She wears a wreath of laurel, gold and palm; 

Her robes of purple and of scarlet dye; 

Her veil of white, as best befits a maid : 

Her ancestors live in the house of fame : 

She giveth arms of happy victory. 

And flowers to deck her lions crowned with gold, 



76 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

This peerless nymph, whom heaven and earth beloves. 

This paragon, this only, this is she. 

In whom do meet so many gifts in one. 

On whom our country gods so often gaze, 

In honor of whose name the Muses sing; 

In state Queen Juno's peer, for power in arms 

And virtues of the mind Minerva's mate. 

As fair and lovely as the Queen of Love, 

As chaste as Dian in her chaste desires: 

The same is she, if Phoebe do no wrong, 

To whom this ball of merit doth belong. 

And after further fitting ceremony, the distance from the 
stage to the throne is traversed and the prize is conveyed into 
the royal hand of the true Eliza. There are more beautiful 
and poetical lines than these just quoted from The Arraign- 
ment, for the comedy abounds in exquisite lyrics, and in 
charming poetry and imagery, but none could better disclose 
tne quality of these plays of courtly compliment. It may be 
surmised that so admirable a piece of poetical flattery would 
have meant preferment and fortune to a pretty fellow like 
Sidney, Greville, or Harington, had any one of them devised 
it; Peele was too lowly to have received more than a brace 
or two of angels for his play, and these we may believe he 
speedily spent in the honor of her majesty's health and to the 
detriment of his own. In the maintenance of the perspective 
of literary history we must recognize in Peek's Arraignment 
of Paris, printed in 1584, a metrical facility, an ease and grace 
of expression in verse, remarkable when we recall that at that 
date Marlowe was still at Cambridge and Shakespeare in- 
distinguishable as yet among his fellow yeomen of Warwick- 
shire. 

And now let us turn to the presentation of these earlier 
plays at court and to some of the means by which they were 
commended in action to their auditors. Shows, maskings, 
and allegorical devices had been so long familiar to the Eng- 
lish court that when the regular drama emerged from the 
chaos of medieval dramatic conditions, all of those things 
were at once adopted. An early use, for example, of dumb 



STAGING OF COURT PLAYS ']'] 

shows or tableaux as we should call them, is to be found in 
such plays as Gorhoduc and Tancred and Gismunda. In 
the first the shows were extraneous to the action of the drama 
though illustrative of it, as for example the parade of a com- 
pany of "harquibusiers" in order of battle to betoken "tu- 
mults, rebellious arms, a civil war. " In Tancred the tableaux 
were for the most part made up of groupings of the personages 
of the tragedy. In both, the dumb show eked out defective 
action and appears to have been derived from an Italian de- 
vice. Costume at court was always elaborate and costly, as 
the extant inventories of the accounts of the office of the revels 
still attest with their entries of silk, velvet and damask, em- 
broidery and cloth of gold and silver. The fitness of this 
apparel for the scene and purpose in hand is often far to seek : 
a friar is clad in russet velvet with sleeves of yellow, Turks 
wear caps unlike either fez or turban, and the Greek worthies 
seem in one case to have been actually labeled with the 
name of each on breast and back. 

The drama of the court was staged from the earliest times 
with properties and even with scenes, in our modern sense, 
of considerable elaboration. These scenes were called "play- 
ers' houses" in the accounts of the revels, and were constructed 
of canvas stretched on frames and painted. Arbors, foun- 
tains, trees, mountains, castles, battlements, and palaces are 
among the scenes thus enumerated, and they were "steered" 
by means of "long boards" or raised and lowered by pulleys. 
Some must have been of considerable size, for cities, hills, 
and forests were sometimes represented and the transportation 
of them by water was deemed of sufficient importance to 
receive a separate entry in the accounts.^ These evidences 
derived from the office of the revels are corroborated when 
we come to look at the plays still extant. Trees appear on 
the stage in Lyly's Gallathea and Love's Metamorphosis, a 
palace in Midas, a fountain and castle in Endimion. The 
Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes and others, acted 
in 1587, represented "the house appointed for Arthur" as 

^ See A. Feuillerat, Documents relating to the Office of the Revels, 
1908, pp. 20, 116, 129, 331, 349. 



78 THE DRAMA AT COURT 

well as Mordred's house. Mother Bombie calls for a row of 
some half-dozen houses, among them a tavern; and the action 
traversed the stage from house to house after the manner of 
medieval pageantry. Gascoigne's Supposes, like several 
early plays, calls for a balcony. Curtains were in constant 
use; they were commonly drawn apart on rings run on wires, 
but in one case at least they appear to have been raised up 
and down. 

In general when a play was given at court or in one of the 
halls of the university the whole room was fitted and decorated 
for the purpose. An interesting account of the arrangement 
of the Common Hall of Christ's Church College, Oxford, 
for the queen's visit of 1566 has come down to us, the work 
of one John Bereblock. The hall was paneled with gilt, 
arched and frescoed to represent an ancient Roman palace. 
A large stage, "many steps high," was erected across the 
upper end on which were reared "palaces and well-equipped 
houses" for the actors and masquers. Scaffolds were raised 
about the room with a lofty seat and golden canopy for the 
queen; and especial attention was given to the brilliant light- 
ing of the entire room by "cressets, lamps, and burning can- 
dles." It has recently been maintained that the private 
theaters, such as Blackfriars, that of the Paul's boys, and 
Whitefriars, were evolved out of these halls of the court 
and university, occasionally fitted for the performance of 
plays; and that their structure and their practices in time 
reacted on the conditions ruling the public stage. On the 
dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII the property of 
the Blackfriars on the embankment north of the Thames 
and east of old Fleet Street, now Bridge Street, reverted to 
the crown. Thither in Edward's day the office of the revels 
was removed with its furniture and apparel for the customary 
performances at court; and here, in all likelihood, the actors 
for court performances rehearsed in the time of Sir Thomas 
Cawarden, Master of the Revels from 1546 to 1560. Plays 
were acted at Blackfriars in the eighties. Both Lyly's Cam- 
pas pe and Sappho and Phao, printed in 1584, contain pro- 
logues "at Blackfriars" as well as "at court." So that 



INFLUENCE OF LYLY 79 

when, in 1596, James Burbage acquired the title to the old 
Priory House in Blackfriars and refitted it as a playhouse 
he was really making no serious innovation. The new Black- 
friars, thus remodeled, cost Burbage upwards of ;^8oo and 
has recently been compared favorably as to size as well as 
equipment with the contemporary public playhouse, the Globe. 
It was furnished with galleries and "lord's rooms," or private 
boxes, and, while it may have accommodated no more than 
half as many auditors as the Globe, had an ample stage and 
sufficient tiring-rooms. The rental of Blackfriars, on its 
remodeling, to the Children of the Royal Chapel was like- 
wise no more than the maintenance of what must long have 
been the conditions of this house. ^ 

Of Lyly's qualities as a dramatist and his place among 
the playwrights of school and court enough has been said. 
But Lyly's influence was wider than this and more lasting. 
It affected the court entertainments which continued in clas- 
sical plays, pastorals, masques, and other entertainments, 
despite much influence from the contemporary popular drama, 
all the way to the closing of the theaters in 1642, and was the 
true source of a distinct and separable stream of growth, 
paralleling the popular drama of Shakespeare. The first 
prominent successor of Lyly, as the accredited entertainer of 
the court, was Samuel Daniel, who outlived Shakespeare 
three years and wrote favorable specimens of that exotic 
form of the drama, the pastoral. Overlapping Daniel in his 
later career was Ben Jonson, the master of the English 
masque. That the grace and easy mastery of the amenities 
of court life which Lyly shows were the example, with much 
else, of both of these can admit of no serious doubt. More 
interesting to us, Lyly profoundly affected the earlier comedy 
of Shakespeare, a theme that will claim, with the considera- 
tion of the earlier popular drama, our attention in the next 
chapter. 

^ On this whole topic see the recent researches of C. W. Wallace 
in Nebraska University Studies, April-July, 1908, since amplified in 
book form. 



CHAPTER VI 

MARLOWE AND HIS FELLOWS IN POPULAR 

DRAMA 

IN the last chapter we were concerned with the drama of 
the schools and the court, with beginnings based on a 
study and imitation of classical ideals, with amateur actors, 
and, in a sense, with amateur authors as well. This drama, 
like most of the non-dramatic literature of the age — the 
sonnets and romance of Sidney, the poetry and allegory of 
Spenser, and the cultivated prose of Lyly — was the literature 
of the select and cultivated few, and to a certain degree existed 
as the shibboleth of a clique. We turn now to something 
very different, to the drama of the people acted in inn-yards 
and by strolling players, written, as acted, professionally and 
before long to develop, in the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, and 
Shakespeare, to a degree of excellence not hitherto known. 

Strolling players and mountebanks are traceable far back 
into the Middle Ages, and link on to the minstrel as the minstrel 
goes farther back to the Anglo-Saxon gleomon or scop. The 
patronage of players' companies by nobles is likewise no inno- 
vation of Tudor times, though, as the drama grew in popularity, 
this patronage became more a form for the players' protection 
than the mark of any intimate relation. The Earl of Lei- 
cester, whose seat of Kenilworth was in Warwickshire near 
to the town of Stratford, was an early patron of actors and 
took a company abroad with him as early as 1585. By some 
this company has been thought to continue into that which 
Shakespeare afterwards joined, variously known as Lord 
Strange's, the Chamberlain's, the King's, and by other titles 
according to its successive patrons. By others the first step 
in this succession has been denied, and the origin of Shake- 
speare's company referred to a troupe under the patronage of 
Lord Strange, mentioned as performing "feats of tumbling 

80 



PROFESSIONAL PLAYERS 8i 

and activity" at court in January, 1580.^ The history of 
Elizabethan companies of professional players is intricate 
and difficult. The same company not only passed through a 
succession of patrons, some troupes disappearing, others 
arising, joining and falling apart, but their personnel was 
constantly changing, alike as to actors and as to the play- 
wrights who were variously employed among them. Thus, 
to look forward no further than 1595, there was the Queen's 
company at the Theater in Shoreditch, Oxford's men and later 
the Earl of Pembroke's at the Curtain near by. Ths Sussex 
men were acting by 1591 at the Rose and the Admiral's in the 
city. Marlowe wrote chiefly for this last-named company; 
Greene, Lodge, Peele, and Kyd for the Queen's, but not 
wholly. Lord Strange's men, the companions of Shakespeare, 
were as yet perhaps unfurnished with a regular playhouse and 
appear to have performed at the Cross-Keys, a tavern in the 
city. In 1592 we hear of this company acting at the Rose, 
a new theater on the Bankside. Later, known as the 
Chamberlain's company, it acted at the Theater, then briefly 
at the Curtain, until its final removal to the new Globe in 

1598- 

The circumstances of the building of the Globe theater 
and the formation of a theatrical company to act there have 
recently been placed in a new light by the researches of Pro- 
fessor Wallace, whose discoveries have already been alluded 
to in this book. It appears that when, in 1597, the Burbage 
brothers met with difficulty in renewing the lease for the 
ground on which the Theater stood, they determined to exer- 
cise a right, reserved in their deed, and remove to the Bank- 
side the material out of which the building had been con- 
structed To insure the success of this venture they associated 
with them five actors — Shakespeare, Heming, Philips, Pope, 
and Kempe — and organized "a sharing company, the first 
of its kind in the theatrical world." The new lease of the site 
for the Globe was so arranged that the two Burbage brothers 
acquired half of it, the five associated actors the other half, 
the total rental being £14. lOs. Shakespeare thus held 

^W. W, Greg, Henslowe's Diary, Part II, 68-71. 



82 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

originally a tenth interest in the Globe; and this continued 
up to 1610, when the five actors admitted Henry Condell to 
a share, reducing the share in the whole of each of the now six 
owners of the actors' half to one twelfth. In 1612 a further 
admission of William Osteler as a sharer reduced the share 
of each of the now seven actor-sharers of the Globe to one 
fourteenth. The Burbages continued to own their half as 
before. To continue this digression into Shakespeare's 
relations to Blackfriars, in 1608 this house, also the property 
of the Burbages, was leased to the Children of the Queen's 
Revels who were suppressed as a company in that year by the 
order of King James. Immediately after, Richard Burbage, 
the owner, leased the Blackfriars to a theatrical company of 
seven persons, retaining a seventh both for himself and his 
brother Cuthbert, and giving five others, among them Shake- 
speare, Heming, and Condell, each a share like his own. The 
total rental was £^0 a year. In 16 14 Shakespeare owned one 
seventh of the Blackfriars and one fourteenth of the Globe. 
The original cost of these shares was merely the rent of the 
ground and the obligations for building and management. 
They became in time very valuable; but the statement in the 
legal complaint of the time from which these facts were 
gathered that the value of such a share as Shakespeare's in 
each of these theaters was ;{^300 is of course excessive, as such 
statements for claim of damage always are. It may be noted 
in passing that Heming and Condell are the fellow-actors of 
Shakespeare who signed their names to the prefatory matter 
of the folio edition of his collected works in 1623.* 

But if we are to appreciate the conditions under which the 
popular drama sprang into life in Elizabeth's time, we must 
understand the nature of the playhouses of the day and learn 
under what circumstances they came to be built. Earlier 
popular theatrical performances followed the traditions of 
wandering minstrels and were acted for the most part in taverns 
or other public places, not infrequently in yards and open 
spaces. The inn-yard is the original of the Elizabethan 
popular playhouse; and the common features of the inn were 

^ See C. W. Wallace in The Times, October 2 and 4, 1999. 



LONDON AND THE PLAYHOUSES 83 

reproduced when structures intended specifically for the public 
acting of plays came to be built. 

Let us turn, however, first to a consideration of the ground. 
Elizabethan London was to our modern ideas a small city, 
certainly not much exceeding a hundred thousand inhabitants. 
It lay along the Thames, then a clear and swiftly flowing 
stream, from the Tower to Temple Bar, and, like most medie- 
val towns, was surrounded by a wall. London was ruled by a 
lord mayor, elected yearly, and by a council which was made 
up of men prominent in the trade guilds of the city. A 
certain gravity and seriousness naturally characterized such 
"city fathers," and their care extended to the minuter welfare 
of the citizens. For this reason quite as much as because 
many of the citizens were Puritan in their leanings, the 
theater was never approved in the councils of the lord mayor. 
For aside from the vanity and ungodliness that they found in 
many plays, they recognized in such concourses of the dis- 
orderly element of the city, a menace to the public peace and 
(most important of all) to the public health. The plague in 
Shakespeare's age was a very real danger; and the general 
ignorance of hygienic rules and popular carelessness in matters 
of cleanliness rendered it at times a veritable terror. Laws 
were passsed closing both churches and playhouses when the 
mortality from the plague rose to a certain percentage; and, 
when buildings for theatrical purposes were projected, the 
lord mayor succeeded in forbidding the erection of any such 
building within the precincts of the city. His jurisdiction 
however stopped without the several gates in the city walls 
and at the middle point of London Bridge, which alone con- 
nected London with Southwark on the Surrey side or Bank- 
side. Under these conditions, we find the earliest playhouses 
just beyond the walls or across the river in Southwark. Thus 
the Theater, the first regular playhouse to be erected in Lon- 
don, was built in the parish of Shoreditch in 1576, and near 
it in Moorfields the Curtain arose in the following year. 
Shoreditch was a borough on the main thoroughfare north, 
without Bishopsgate. The Theater was built by James Bur- 
bage, father of the famous actor, Richard. It was demol- 



84 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

ished in 1598 and the materials used in part for the building 
of the Globe. But the Bankside was soon recognized as a 
more favorable location for the erection of playhouses. The 
Bankside had long been in use as a playground and place of 
license and diversion. Bull-baiting and bear-baiting were 
among its amusements and the two old arenas for these pur- 
poses existed long before the theaters. The Globe, the Rose, 
the Hope, and the Swan were the four Elizabethan theaters 
of the Bankside. All of them were built within the decade of 
the nineties and, in the order named above, they ranged 
irregularly along the river shore to the right of him who crossed 
London Bridge from the city or to the left of the bridge and 
the Church of St. Saviour's, as one looks at a map or a view 
of old London. There were other theaters besides these, the 
one at Newington Butts, back from the river in Southwark; 
the Fortune, a new and fine theater for its day, built in 1600 
by Edward Alleyn in St. Giles, Cripplegate, in rivalry with 
Shakespeare and his Globe. And there were the private 
theaters of Blackfriars, Whitefriars, and that of the boys of 
St. Paul's; but these latter ones do not concern us here. 

The last few years have witnessed much interest in the 
construction of these old Elizabethan playhouses and in the 
probable manner in which Elizabethan plays were staged. 
Unfortunately the evidence at hand is sparse and, what is 
worse, at times, conflicting: moreover, it has been occasionally 
somewhat unwisely assumed that it is possible to reduce the 
whole problem to a typical stage. Undoubtedly the play- 
houses of Elizabeth differed as the theaters of to-day and what 
may have been true of one may possibly not have been true of 
all. This is not the place for discussion; of some things, 
however, we may feel reasonably sure. 

The Elizabethan public playhouse was ordinarily a cir- 
cular or octagonal structure built about an open space or 
yard to which there was but one public entrance at which 
"gate money" might be charged. Within, the yard was open 
to the sky and here the "groundlings" as they were called 
stood to see the play. As to three fourths of its circumference 
the yard was surrounded with galleries, two or three, and in 



THE ELIZABETHAN PLAYHOUSE 85 

them sat the auditors of better station; although the highest 
gallery must have been as undesirable then as to-day. In 
the fourth part of the circumference and opposite the entrance 
door, the stage was situated, jutting far out into the yard so 
that the groundlings stood on three sides of it. The stage of 
Shakespeare's time was primarily a platform for declamation, 
not, as with us, a place for a picture set in a frame. The 
roof over the stage was supported by two pillars or "pilasters" 
as they were called; but they appear to have stood back from 
the front of the stage, and it is doubtful whether they were 
near the two edges or not, rather, placed closer together so as 
to produce the effect of a structure near the middle of the 
stage and thus leave space for free action not only in front 
but around each pillar at the side. There has also been much 
question as to whether or not a curtain was strung between 
the pilasters. Certainly no drop curtain, such as we now use^ 
was employed on a public stage before the Restoration. As 
there are many references in the stage directions of old plays 
to curtains (or traverses as they were sometimes called), it 
has been thought that, if they were not stretched between the 
pilasters, they were draped to hang beneath the balcony or 
gallery that ran across the back of the stage, thus dividing 
the stage into the part before the pilasters, the part between 
the pilasters and the curtain, and the corridor or alcove under 
the balcony. The opinion of the present writer leans to a 
curtain between the pilasters, thus bringing out the action on 
the back part of the stage to a point immediately behind them 
rather than concealing it in the shadow of the balcony. As 
to the balcony itself, it, too, was furnished with curtains and 
was employed wherever an upper window, a battlement, or 
other eminence was necessary to the action. The music, of 
the use of which between the acts and elsewhere there is 
abundant proof, was doubtless at times placed in a part of 
of the balcony which was in the nature of a gallery and may 
have been arranged diagonally at its two extremities.^ 

Among the many questions concerning the Elizabethan 
stage none has been waged more fiercely than that which 

^ See W. Archer in The Quarterly Review, April, 1908. 



86 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

concerns the presence or absence of scenery on the stage. 
On the one hand all scenery has been denied; but we hear in 
at least two authentic passages of its existence in such a phrase 
as Jonson's (1600) '"Slid, the boy takes me for a piece of 
perspective," and in Dekker's words (1609): "Stand at the 
helm and steer the passage of the scenes."^ Moreover it is 
well known that there were abundance of scenic properties 
at court in times far earlier than Shakespeare's. It must be 
allowed that there was no such, system of perspective by means 
of back curtain and side flies as we have now in use; but it is 
defiant of both evidence and probabilty to deny to the Eliza- 
bethan popular stage many, scenic properties of considerable 
size and variety. Thrones of state, trees, buildings of im- 
portance enough to be designated ''castles," hangings suggest- 
ing the rigging of a ship, even landscapes and cities find men- 
tion again and again, and we should be impelled to believe 
in the use of such properties, were the evidence less certain 
than it is, from the influence that performances at court must 
in time have exerted on the popular stage. 

That the use of properties such as these was often very 
crude and insuflScient according to our modern ideas must be 
granted. The Elizabethan stage has been thought by some 
to have inherited from medieval conditions the practice of 
what has been called simultaneous scenery. Heavier proper- 
ties must frequently have remained on the stage though often 
incongruous to the action which appears at times to have 
moved from one part of the stage to another. When the action 
was about the throne set in the center, a presence chamber 
was conjured with imagination's inward eye. When the 
action sidled to a tree in a box to the left it was transferred to 
the country-side. To escape this incongruity (to our modern 
ideas), some have imagined that heavy properties were con- 
fined to the space back of the curtain into which they might 
be lugged from the tiring-room and concealed by the curtain 
when not in use. Attempt has even been made to divide 
Shakespeare's plays into a strict alternation of scenes before 

^ See Giiford-Cunningham, yo«j6n, ii, 210; The Gulls' Hornhook, 
Grosart, Dekker, ii, 248. 



PROPERTIES AND STAGING 87 

the curtain and scenes behind, to allow of such shifts of the 
properties. However, of late it must be confessed that a very 
good case has been made out for a liberal modification of 
some such system, based on a study of the staging of theatri- 
cal productions from the medieval times up and, more espe- 
cially, from the Restoration backward. '^ None the less we may 
believe that not a little of the setting of the Elizabethan stage 
was content to symbolize the scene by some important object 
suggesting it, and to be little hurt by incongruities which 
would destroy the illusion to modern auditors. With the 
intervention of incidental music and the employment, where 
there was need, of the curtain which divided the rear stage 
from the front, the action of an Elizabethan play must have 
been carried on continuously all over the stage and gallery. 
Indeed, those who have seen Shakespeare simply staged with 
next to no scenery and acted without division by waits between 
acts or scenes, have recognized how much our old drama has 
to gain by a reversion to earlier and less elaborate methods of 
histrionic representation. 

As to the acting of an Elizabethan play, it is to be remem- 
bered that the performance was for men and acted by men. 
The employment of women to act on the stage of the day 
would have been thought a disgrace and a scandal. In fact, 
in stricter Elizabethan times no woman of character would 
think of attending a common playhouse; and when later, she 
did, she wore a mask. Women's roles were taken by boys 
who appear to have become remarkably skilful in their diffi- 
cult profession, though none ever attained the rank of such 
men as Burbage and Edward AUeyn, the leaders in male parts 
and the creators of the chief roles of Shakespeare and Marlowe. 
The performance of a play, in old times, must often have been 
a very disorderly proceeding, for gallants were tolerated on 
the very stage itself and disturbances often arose among the 
auditors, breaking up the performance and ending at times 
in affrays and bloodshed. It is impossible not to sympathize 
with the mayor and his council in their honest endeavors to 
abate such nuisances and in their wider looks askant at the 

^ See especially V. E. Albright, The Shakesperian Stage, 1909. 



88 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

theater, in general, as an innovation of doubtful character. 
The Elizabethan drama could not plead, like the old sacred 
drama, that it instructed men in the gospel. It could not claim, 
like the morality, that it existed to teach right living, or like 
the Latin school plays to impart confidence to the boys who 
acted and improve their Latin pronunciation. The new 
drama had no excuse for its existence, and existed only to 
amuse. There was a long struggle between the city and the 
court about the professional players and their theaters, the 
city passing laws against actors and plays, pleading their 
wickedness and licentiousness, the danger to the public peace 
and to the public health. On the other hand the court pro- 
tected the actors, who commonly gave as an excuse for their 
popular performances that they must practise if they were to 
perform before the queen, and, claiming the protection of 
some noble as patron, thus escaped the rigor of the laws against 
"rogues, vagabonds, and common players." 

As time went on the actors thrived and rose in the social 
scale. In Greene's tract A Groatsworth of Wit Purchased 
with a Million of Repentance, notorious for its attack on 
Shakespeare, we find the following little colloquy on this 
subject: 

What is your profession ? said Roberto. Truly, sir, said he, I 
am a player. A player! quoth Roberto, I took you rather for a 
gentleman of great living; for, if by outward habit men should be 
censured, I tell you you would be taken for a substantial man. So 
am I, where I dwell, quoth the player, reputed able at my proper cost 
to build a windmill. What though the world once went hard with 
me, when I was fain to carry my fardel a foot-a-back; . . . it is 
otherwise now; for my very share in playing apparel will not be sold 
for two hundred pounds. 

The player here represented may have been one Robert 
Wilson of the queen's company of actors in 1583, the author 
of three or four extant plays in which the old morality is 
mingled with newer ideas. Elsewhere, he tells us "the twelve 
labors of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage and 
placed three scenes of the devil on the highway to heaven." 
Another early popular actor and playwright was Richard 



PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS 89 

Tarlton, who was famed for his clown's parts and for antics 
and humors that found a place in the jest-books of the time. 
Tarlton was of the humblest origin and in the height of his 
success kept a tavern in Gracechurch Street. He died in 
1588, the year of the Armada, but he was long outlived by the 
fame of his extemporal wit, a variety of extemporaneous em- 
broidering on the part assigned that drew from Shakespeare 
in later times the terse words of Hamlet: "Let those that 
play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them." 
Not only is the number of these early pre-Shakespearean 
plays of the common stages very great, but their variety is 
extraordinary. Besides the English historical subjects already 
suggested in Tarlton's Famous Victories of Henry V (a crude 
production, not unknown to Shakespeare), and plays like the 
anonymous Troublesome Reign of King John (another Shake- 
spearean "source"), there was a domestic comedy like Grim 
the Collier of Croyden, or Tom Tyler, a diverting interlude in 
which an attempt to tame a shrewish wife proves amusingly 
abortive. There was also domestic drama, represented in the 
able and effective Arden of Feversham, a tragedy which some 
have thought not unworthy to assign to Shakespeare. And 
there was, besides the semi-moralities of Wilson, romantic 
• drama dealing with knights and fair ladies, Greene's Orlando 
Furioso and The Thracian Wonder, turned to probably satiri- 
cal references in such a play as Fair Em, the Miller s Daughter 
of Manchester. Without pursuing this enumeration further 
here, it is demonstrable that nearly all the notable varieties of 
the Elizabethan drama were already presaged in rudimentary 
form before the morality went out of vogue. Not only did 
Shakespeare invent no solitary kind of play not already well 
known to the stage before him; but no one of his great prede- 
cessors — Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, or Kyd — invented 
a new variety of drama. It is important to recognize how 
fully the soil had been prepared for the great harvest that was 
to follow, how an humble but by no means despicable growth 
had already covered these previous times, and how the play- 
house, the organized company, an audience eager for the 
drama and accustomed to it, all had been created before the 



90 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

great and memorable playwrights of the time came forward to 
assume their inheritance. 

The three great influences that made Elizabethan drama 
are now before us. First, the influence of the classics — 
Plautus for comedy, Seneca for tragedy — exemplified in 
Ralph Roister Doister on the one hand and Gorhoduc on the 
other. Secondly, the influence of the popular vernacular 
farce, English to the core though touched by French ex- 
ample: in comedy illustrated in Gammer Gurton or Tom 
Tyler, and pure of any foreign contact in the murder play, 
Arden of Feversham. Thirdly, the influence of Italy and the 
spirit of romance, already suggested in Lyly's courtly plays, 
in Tancred, and in Whetstone's Promos and Cassatidra, and 
soon to become the distinguishing characteristic of the great 
dramas of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Webster. 

With Lyly and Peele, it is customary to place Lodge, 
Greene, and Nash as well as Kyd and Marlowe, to call them 
indiscriminately "university wits" or by a like designation 
to dilate upon their short and abandoned lives and the precise 
similarlity of their alleged careers. Kyd was not a university 
man; and Lyly, at least, was no Bohemian. Lodge, despite 
early escapades, lived far into the reign of James, a respectable 
physician, and wrote, besides Marius and Sylla, hardly any 
drama certainly traceable as his. Nash's part, too, in the 
drama is slight, and consists of one masque-like production. 
Summer's Last Will and Testament, o£ Dido, Queen of Carthage, 
a tragedy written in conjunction with Marlowe, and a lost 
Latin comedy. Nothing could be more uncritical than the 
habitual grouping of these "predecessors of Shakespeare." 

Of Peele enough has been said above as to how he trans- 
ferred his interests in the drama, first from the university to 
court and thence to the popular stage of Wilson and Tarlton. 
Peele's art was imitative, as we have seen, his life dissolute, 
his end untimely; but his satirical consciousness of the ab- 
surdities of the popular plays about him — plays that he imi- 
tated in David and Bethsahe and especially in Edward I, 
while he parodied them in The Old Wives Tale and in 



ROBERT GREENE 91 

Locrine — Is not without its interest to the history of the 
drama. 

Greene, too, was a man of disordered life, although the 
candor of his revelations concerning himself and the circum- 
stance of his enmity to Shakespeare have conspired perhaps 
somewhat to exaggerate his bad name. Greene was a busy 
pamphleteer as well as playwright, and death overtook him, 
as it overtook Marlowe, in the midst of his sins. Greene 's 
work, like of Peele's, was imitative and eclectic. In A Look- 
ing Glass for London and England, which he wrote with 
Thomas Lodge, he gives us work of the morality type, little 
above the plane of Wilson, though superior in execution. 
In Orlando Furioso he outdid the excesses of the heroical 
romance; in Alphonsus of Aragon he essayed the "high as- 
tounding terms" of Marlowe's Tamhurlaine. None the less 
Greene's genuine contribution to Elizabethan drama is both 
considerable and peculiar. In The Scottish History of 
"James I V he. has given us a serious comedy of very consider- 
able worth, memorable for the fine and pathetic pictures of 
true womanhood represented in both his heroine, Ida, and 
the queen. In Friar Bacon he dramatized the story of that 
famous English necromancer and contrasted his white and 
harmless magic with the black art of Marlowe's Faustus, 
which was at the moment holding the stage. Though truer 
to nature and more peculiarly Greene's own are the charming 
scenes in this comedy which tell of the love and courtship of 
the Fair Maid of Fressingfield who is wooed for his prince 
but won for himself by the young Earl Lacy, after a manner 
familiar to American readers of Longfellow's Courtship of 
Miles Standish. Equally successful and characteristic of 
Greene, is his apotheosis of the English yeoman in George a 
Green or the Pinner of Wakefield. This hero impounds an 
earl's horses that have trespassed on the town's corn, defeats 
Robin Hood himself at quarterstafF, and cleverly traps and 
captures the king's enemies. For all these services King 
Edward, who happens that way, asks George to demand what 
he will. And his reply is that the king may use his influence 



92 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

to induce old Grimes, his "leman's father," to consent to that 
maiden's marriage with him. This granted, the king adds: 

Now, George, it rests I gratify thy worth : 

Kneel down, George: 

George. What will your majesty do ? 

Edward. Dub thee a knight, George. 

George. I beseech your grace, grant me one thing. 

Edward. What is it ? 

George. Then let me live and die a yeoman still: 

So was my father, so must live his son. 

For 'tis more credit to men of base degree. 

To do great deeds, than men of dignity. 

Can we not imagine how at this the pit must have risen to a 
man ? And what could be a better example of the truly popu- 
lar nature of this new people's drama .? 

Could Greene have lived and led a less disordered life, 
could he have developed leisurely and harmoniously instead 
of driving an overworked pen for bread, Shakespeare might 
not have been without a rival in comedy worthy his best 
efforts. The pathetic story of Greene's end, his miserable 
death from his own excesses, his touching letter to his wronged 
and deserted wife that she see those paid who had buried him 
out of pity, is known to every student, as well as his notorious 
address to his quondam acquaintance, Marlowe, Peele, and 
Lodge "who spend their time in making plays." It was 
sheer envy that prompted the dying Greene rancorously to 
attack the rising young Shakespeare, to call him "an upstart 
crow beautified with our feathers," to imagine Shakespeare 
so elated with his own success that he had become "in his own 
conceit the only shake-scene in a country." But there was 
another side, Greene was a genuine poet, an able playwright, 
a successful pamphleteer, all this despite his reckless life and 
wasted time. Such a man must have known of possibilities 
within which we can not reconstruct from the broken remains 
of his work. Infinitely above the painstaking achievements of 
mediocrity is the comparative failure of an irregular genius 
such as Greene's. 



THOMAS KYD 93 

English romantic tragedy reached fruition all but simul- 
taneously in two great plays, T amhurlaine in two parts by 
Christopher Marlowe, and The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas 
Kyd. Both plays were certainly on the stage a year or more 
before the coming of the Armada; but which is the earlier 
has never been absolutely determined, for neither exhibits the 
slightest borrowing from the other and each expresses an 
independent phase of tragic art. 

Until recently we have known very little of Thomas Kyd; 
now we can tell — thanks to Professor Schick of Munich and 
to Mr. Boas and his researches — that Kyd was born in 1558, 
in London, and attended the Merchant Tailors' School where 
Lodge and Spenser were among his school-fellows. Kyd's 
father was a scrivener or lawyer's clerk and Thomas may have 
followed that "trade of noverint" as it was called. He ap- 
pears not to have gone to either university, but was admitted 
to the literary circle of the Sidneys and Pembrokes and en- 
joyed the intimate acquaintance of Marlowe. The poets at 
one time occupied together the same room, a circumstance 
that drew Kyd into suspicion of sharing also in Marlowe's 
alleged atheistical opinions, Kyd was even imprisoned on 
charges connected with this association and lost all chances of 
patronage therefore. Indeed, whether for this cause or for 
some other, Kyd was disowned by his parents, who renounced 
the administration of the goods of their deceased son in De- 
cember, 1594. 

The height of Kyd's activity as a dramatist was concen- 
trated within a very few years, those between 1584 and 1589. 
The Spanish Tragedy was doubtless his earliest dramatic work 
and the companion play called The First Part ofjeronimo is 
best considered not Kyd's, but a production subsequently 
written by another on account of the popularity of Kyd's 
tragedy. A second and less successful drama of much the 
type of The Spanish Tragedy is Soliman and Perceda, dating 
1588, and assuredly of Kyd's authorship. The translation 
of a tragedy by Garnier called Cornelia, published in 1592, 
and a lost play on Hamlet, 1587, complete the tale of Kyd's 
dramatic labors. 



94 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

The Spanish Tragedy is the most typical of the tragedies 
of Kyd. The story details the revenge of a father, the Mar- 
shal Hieronimo, for the murder of his son, who has been slain 
under circumstances that leave the father uncertain of the 
slayer and incapable of redress. Madness, actual or pre- 
tended, and hesitancy to act add to the difficulties of Hieron- 
imo; but, discerning at length in the Prince Lorenzo the true 
instigator of the murder, and with revenge for that reason even 
more than ever beyond his reach, Hieronimo pulls down gen- 
eral ruin on his enemies and himself, in a play devised to 
bring about the catastrophe. The interest of The Spanish 
Tragedy centers in the vital personage Hieronimo, This 
became one of the favorite roles of Edward Alleyn and was 
revised and amplified on revival by Ben Jonson. The popu- 
larity of Kyd 's tragedy lasted a generation; seven quartos up 
to 1608 and repeated allusions attesting its vogue and reputa- 
tion. Nor is it to be denied that this popularity was deserved. 
The Spanish Tragedy is effective melodrama, bold, striking, 
dramatically efficient, and not untrue to the broader outlines 
of life. The text affords many examples of the rhetorical 
diction so beloved of the playgoers of the earlier days of Eliza- 
beth and taken off, not altogether unkindly, by Shakespeare 
in the speech of the player in Hamlet and in the soldier's 
account of the battle at the opening of Macbeth. The follow- 
ing passage is Kyd, not Shakespeare : 

There met our armies in their proud array: 
Both furnished well, both full of hope and fear, 
Both menacing alike with daring shows, 
Both vaunting sundry colors of device, 
Both cheerly sounding trumpets, drums and fifes, 
Both raising dreadful clamors to the sky. 
That valleys, hills, and rivers made rebound 
And heaven itself was frighted with the sound. 

Now, while Bellona rageth here and there. 
Thick storms of bullets rain like winter's hail, 
And shivered lances dark the troubled air; 



"THE SPANISH TRAGEDY" 95 

On every side drop captains to the ground 

And soldiers, some ill-maimed, some slain outright: 

Here falls a body sundered from his head; 

There legs and arms He bleeding on the grass, 

Mingled with weapons and unboweled steeds, 

That scattering over-spread the purple plain. 

In all this turmoil, three long hours and more 

The victory to neither part inclined. 

Till Don Andrea with his brave lanciers 

In their main battle made so great a breach 

That, half dismayed, the multitude retired. 

Till, Phoebus waning to the western deep, 
Our trumpeters were charged to sound retreat. 

Although the direct influence of Seneca on Kyd is patent to 
the most casual reader, the novel and apparently original plot 
of The Tragedy, its swift action, inventive episode, and real 
passion mark something new. There had been no play up to 
its time alike so well constructed and possessed of personages 
so vitally conceived. 

Another interesting thing about Kyd is the unquestionable 
fact that he was the author of a play called Hamlet, on the 
stage at least as. early as 1589, though now irretrievably lost. 
This play appears to have been of a Senecan character and 
it is interesting to notice that the situation of the Hamlet that 
we know and that of The Spanish Tragedy offers a striking 
parallel. Hamlet is the story of the revenge of a son for the 
murder of his father; The Spanish Tragedy, as we have seen, 
the story of the revenge of a father for the murder of his son. 
In both the fundamental idea is revenge under circumstances 
justified by the impossibility of other redress, revenge height- 
ened in difficulty of attainment by the hesitancy of the pro- 
tagonist and by his real or pretended madness. 

Christopher Marlowe was born at Canterbury in February, 
1564, and was thus some two months Shakespeare's senior. 
His station in life was not much higher, as his father was a 
shoemaker and tanner, though he acted likewise as clerk of 
St. Mary's. Marlowe was a precocious boy and from the 
King's school at Canterbury he went up to Cambridge which 



96 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

he finally left with a master's degree in 1587. Of his early 
life in London we know as little as of Shakespeare's. It can 
not be proved that Marlowe was an actor, but we know that 
most of his plays were written for the Admiral's company and 
that Alleyn acted in them. Marlowe's career must have 
been well under way before the coming of the Armada and it 
is not impossible that he was a dramatist of repute before 
he attained his higher degree at Cambridge. Unlike Shake- 
speare and Jonson, Marlowe appears not to have served an 
apprenticeship to the drama, but leaped to immediate fame by 
that daring production Tamburlaine, which was on the stage 
by 1587. Thereafter his works followed year after year until 
seven dramas, his in whole or in part, were credited to his 
name with we know not how much other journeyman work 
in unacknowledged collaboration with others. Marlowe, as 
we make it out, was one about whom men held definite opin- 
ions; he had enemies and many friends, among the latter 
Raleigh and Sir Thomas Walsingham of Chislehurst. Mar- 
lowe must have known his contemporaries, the playwrights, 
thoroughly well. Nash collaborated with him, while Shake- 
speare alludes to him tenderly in Js Tou Like It. Marlowe 
was unorthodox in his opinions and unwisely frank in uttering 
them; but it is difficult to believe the author of Faustus an 
atheist. There are no actual evidences that Marlowe led a 
loose life, although the sensuousness of his poetical imagina- 
tion is indubitable. He died prematurely in 1593 under cir- 
cumstances that are really unknown. The stories of a dis- 
creditable brawl in which he ended his life blaspheming, the 
allegations as to his atheism and abandoned life are inventions 
which have gathered about his name since his death to adorn 
a fanciful example of the depravity of the player and the 
unorthodox; and, strange, as it may appear, priest and Puritan 
combined to draw the monster. 

Seldom has any poet begun his career with so definite and 
purposeful an ideal as Marlowe. If we are to judge from the 
conscious pronouncement of the prologue to Tamburlaine, 
Marlowe set his face from the first against the trivialities of 



MARLOWE'S "TAMBURLAINE" 97 

the comic stage, which he designates as "such conceits as 
clownage keeps in pay," and against the old tumbUng, running 
measures, illustrated in such plays as Gammer Gurton. It 
was force, dignity, and passion that Marlowe demanded of the 
romantic drama and in choosing blank-verse he fixed the 
medium of serious drama for generations to come. Tam- 
burlaine was a splendid gage of promise for a youth of twenty- 
three to throw down to his age. The two parts of Tambur- 
laine — for the popularity of the first part soon demanded a 
second — are best described as an heroic epic in dramatic 
form. The tale of the Scythian conqueror of the eastern 
world and his rise from a shepherd to be king over kings is 
told in language befitting so heroic a theme, and if it dilates 
at time into the extravagant and bombastic, it is pervaded 
none the less throughout with fire, poetry, and genuine 
passion. The popularity of Tamhurlaine was immediate 
and it begot in hands less forcible a long line of like 
heroical plays. 

The second dramatic venture of Marlowe was the drama- 
tizing of the world-story of Faustus. How exactly the poet 
came by the theme is not altogether clear, as the earliest ex- 
tant translation of the German Faust-huch bears date 1592 
and Marlowe's tragedy was certainly on the stage four years 
earlier. The play, as we have it, seems sketchy and in- 
complete. Moreover, it is disfigured with scenes of precisely 
the type of clownage which Marlowe had so reprobated in the 
prologue of Tamburlaine. Yet, with both these shortcomings, 
Faustus is a surprisingly effective tragedy in which the throes 
and agonies of the unhappy hero who had bartered his soul for 
a few short years of power and pleasure in this world, are set 
forth with a distinction of phrase, a quality of poetic imagery 
and a poignant appreciation of the agony of hopeless repent- 
ance unequaled in English drama. Least justifiable of all 
are quotations from the dramas, for here everything depends 
on the situation in hand, the personages, and the unity of the 
complete whole; yet, possibly better in the following than in 
some more striking passage, may the reader discern alike the 



98 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

temper of Faustus in his inordinate lust after power as well 
as the limpid and effective diction of Marlowe: 
Oh what a world of profit and delight, 
Of power, of honor, of omnipotence 
Is promised to the studious artisan! 
All things that move between the quiet poles 
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings 
Are but obeyed in their several provinces, 
Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds; 
But his dominion that exceeds in this 
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man; 
A sound magician is a mighty god: 
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity. 

But the good and the evil angel, after the manner of the old 

morality, are ever at hand with their alternate promptings: 

O Faustus! lay that damned book aside 

And gaze not on it lest it tempt thy soul. 

And heap God's heavy wrath upon thy head. 

Read, read the Scriptures: that is blasphemy. 

And the other replies: 

Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art. 
Wherein all Nature's treasure is contained: 
Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky, 
Lord and commander of these elements. 

The angels disappear and Faustus continues in soliloquy: 
How am I glutted with conceit of this! 
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, 
Resolve me of all ambiguities. 
Perform what desperate enterprise I will ? 
I'll have them fly to India for gold. 
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl. 
And search all corners of the new-found world 
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates; 
I'll have them read me strange philosophy 
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings; 
I '11 have them wall all Germany with brass, 
And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg, 
I'll have them fill the public schools with silk. 
Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad; 



OTHER PLAYS OF MARLOWE 99 

I'll levy soldiers with the coin they bring, 
And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, 
And reign sole king of all the provinces. 

In The Jew of Malta Marlowe found a less universal 
theme, but constructively he produced a better play. It is 
Marlov^e's misfortune that his indignant and revengeful Jew^ 
should be thrown inevitably into contrast with Shylock. 
Barabas is the incarnation of superhuman revenge (not greed, 
for that is secondary to him), as Tamburlaine depicts inor- 
dinate lust of empire, and Faustus inordinate lust of knowledge 
and supernatural power. To compare Barabas, therefore, 
to Shylock, who remains ever human, is unfair, for the very 
terms of Marlowe's art demand a different scale of values. 
The Jew of Malta is a lurid and terrible play: but it must have 
been most effective on the stage. To upbraid Marlowe for 
following the popular conception of his day as to the race 
whose badge is sufferance is as preposterous as it is to read 
into Shakespeare a humanitarian spirit which belonged not 
to his time. 

The last of the unaided plays of Marlowe is Edward II, 
in its source and more general characteristics a chronicle 
history like much that had gone before; but, in its conception 
of an unkingly king in struggle with his surroundings, in the 
pity and the terror of his fall, a tragedy, worthy to hold place 
beside Shakespeare. The advance in dramatic construction 
of Edward II over Marlowe's previous plays is alone enough 
to set at rest, once and for all, the notion that Marlowe's 
genius was not dramatic. Almost anything might have been 
predicted of a poet who at less than thirty had compassed the 
overwhelming pathos of the closing scene of this tragedy. 
But Marlowe was dead at the opening of the year 1594, leaving 
however behind him a repute, foremost among the poets and 
dramatists of his day, and affecting subsequent drama, for his 
images of dilation and heroic resolve, for his genuine passion, 
power over the phrase and poetry, more than any man of his 
time. 

Of Dido, Queen of Carthage, in which, according to the 
quarto of 1594, Nash assisted Marlowe, and of The Massacre 



100 EARLIER POPULAR DRAMA 

at Paris, the last of Marlowe's works, but a word must suffice. 
Dido was acted (unlike the other plays of Marlowe) by the 
Children of the Chapel and may have been written early, 
though the blank-verse is mature. The whole play is less 
vital than the rest of Marlowe's work. The Massacre ex- 
hibits haste in composition and exists only in a corrupt text. 
It is interesting as the earliest extant play to lay under con- 
tribution the annals of France and to employ them in much 
the way that the English chronicles were to be so largely used 
by Shakespeare and others. 

The new romantic drama that sprang into being in the 
years immediately preceding the Armada is referable above all 
to the influence and example of Kyd and Marlowe, the former 
marking the steps from Seneca, the latter showing a freer 
spirit all his own. Among the many plays inspired by their 
example may be mentioned Peek's Battle of Alcazar, Greene's 
Alphonsus of Aragon and Selimus, if the latter be his, the 
anonymous Wars of Cyrus, 2Lndi other conqueror plays, as they 
have been called from their immediate inspiration in Tam- 
burlaine. Of more general though no less certain suggestion 
in Kyd and Marlowe are the several plays on Titus of which 
we hear about this time, the only one surviving being Titus 
Andronicus, variously accredited and denied to Shakespeare. 
A play of like class is Lust's Dominion, written at latest in 
1600, but published for the first time long after. This melo- 
dramatic production reproduces a queen of the extravagant 
lust of Tamora, a Moor of equal wickedness with Aaron, and 
otherwise imitates Titus Andronicus. Lust's Dominion has 
been identified with The Spanish Moors Tragedy, mentioned 
in Henslowe as the work of Dekker, Haughton, and Day. It 
is certainly not Marlowe's. 

With the death of Marlowe and Kyd, Elizabethan drama 
was well launched on its conquering career: for it had gained 
by this time not only dramatists to depict life, transfigured 
with the illumination of poetry, but it had found as well, in 
men like Alleyn and Burbage, actors to interpret the written 
word on the stage. Edward Alleyn, through his marriage 
with the daughter of Philip Henslowe, an exploiter of plays for 



ALLEYN AND BURBAGE loi 

the rivals of Shakespeare's company, acquired the financial 
support necesssary to success on the boards, and became notable 
in tragedy, especially for the chief roles of Marlowe's plays. 
Alleyn inherited Henslowe's wealth and, with money gained 
by his own talents, retired, like Shakespeare later, a substan- 
tially rich man. Richard Burbage's career was not dissimilar. 
His father, James Burbage, was a joiner by trade and became, 
through this, concerned in the erection of the Theater in 
Shoreditch, first of Elizabethan playhouses. The interest of 
the family in the stage continued through three generations, 
Richard holding large shares in the Theater, the Globe, and 
Blackfriars and making a reputation on the tragic stage that 
placed him at the head of his profession. Burbage's asso- 
ciation throughout his life was with the company to which 
Shakespeare v/as attached; and it was he who created the most 
important tragic roles of the great dramatist. A lifelong 
friendship existed between the two, and of late their names 
have been discovered in an association not hitherto suspected. 
It appears that in March, 1613, the steward of the Earl of 
Rutland paid Shakespeare "forty-four shillings in gold" for a 
design of an "impresa" or semi-heraldic pictorial badge with its 
attendant motto, and an equal sum to Burbage for "painting" 
the same and "making it in gold." The invention of devices 
of this kind was a fashionable pursuit of scholarly and literary 
men of the day, and we hear of Sidney, Daniel, Camden, Jon- 
son, Donne, and Drummond, all as variously interested in 
them. The connection of Shakespeare's name with pictorial 
art is new, but in no wise surprising. As to Burbage, there 
is a picture of him in Dulwich College which purports to be 
the work of his own brush. The notion that he may likewise 
have painted, in 1609, the portrait of Shakespeare on wood 
from which the Droeshout engraving of the title-page of the 
first folio was subsequently copied, must be pronounced fanci- 
ful. Burbage continued on the boards long after the retire- 
ment of Alleyn, dying in 1619, three years after the death of 
Shakespeare. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PAMPHLET AND THE PROSE OF CON- 
TROVERSY 

COULD you or I have had the good fortune to have 
strolled out into the narrow streets of Elizabethan Lon- 
don, along Cheapside, past the Standard where culprits were 
displayed in the stocks or the pillory, and where condemned 
books were burned by the common hangman; into Gracious 
Street or Bishopsgate where were many taverns still used as 
cheaper playhouses; or back to St. Paul's Churchyard where 
the scriveners and stationers chiefly congregated, we should 
have been struck by the sight on all sides of bright and con- 
spicuous signs, marking not only shops with their wares 
displayed on booths, but private houses as well. Your blue- 
coated servant might be a very intelligent and trustworthy 
fellow, but to give him a letter for delivery, addressed as we 
address letters with name, street, and number, would have been 
to nonplus him hopelessly. Such was the dilemma of Capulet's 
servant, who, given a written list of persons to invite to his 
master's feast, was compelled, as he put it, "to resort to the 
learned." "To my very dear friend, Antonio at the Elephant 
in the south suburb" would have reached Sebastian's friend 
in Twelfth Night, precisely as a meeting might have been 
arranged between two bookish friends at the shop of Thomas 
Fisher at the Sign of the White Hart in Fleet Street, seller of 
J Midsummer-Night's Dream, or of Thomas Heyes in Paul's 
Churchyard at the Sign of the Green Dragon, for whom one 
of the quartos of The Merchant of Venice was printed. 

It is improbable that three out of ten of the general popu- 
lation of the London of Elizabeth could read or were habitu- 
ated to writing more than their names. Shakespeare's father 
affixed his mark, and it has been declared that the art of read- 
ing and writing remained a mystery to Judith, Shakespeare's 

102 



PAMPHLET AND NEWSPAPER 103 

daughter. Be these bits of gossip true or false, it is plain that 
the age attached no such importance to what Carlyle calls 
"the mystery of alphabetic letters" as do we. Now, we know 
scarcely any education save that which comes through books, 
and illiteracy is a brand and a stigma. Such was not Eliza- 
beth's age. The London of Shakespeare's time could not 
have numbered a hundred and twenty thousand souls, and 
there was no other large city in England. With a reading 
public thus limited in numbers and by illiteracy, it is amaz- 
ing how many books the Elizabethan and Jacobean press 
put forth. What proportion of the population of a modern 
British or American city would buy the collected edition of 
a popular contemporary playwright at say twenty or twenty- 
five dollars a volume .? That was about the comparative 
price of the first folio of Shakespeare in 1623, the year of 
its publication. The exhaustion of the first edition of this 
work in nine years, with a possible ten thousand readers in 
all England, means little less than the twentieth thousand of 
some cheap passing novel of to-day with the possibility of fifty 
or — if it cross seas — a hundred million purchasers. 

It is often affirmed that the theater of Shakespeare ab- 
sorbed to itself the functions of the newspaper, including those 
of our magazines, reviews, and other like publications. But 
the theater was not alone. The pamphlet already existed, 
and the pamphlet and the broadside were the forerunners of 
the modern newspaper. The works of the pamphleteers, of,^ 
Breton, Rowlands, Greene, Nash, Dekker, and many others, 
are often among the rarest of books. No one thought of pre- 
serving such productions any more than we think of treasuring 
old newspapers; and they were read as thoughtlessly and 
destroyed as carelessly as we read and destroy newspapers to- 
day. The Elizabethan pamphlet is any piece of ephemeral 
printing, from a prognostication of the weather or a ballad 
turned into rime because of some recent event, to a tract of 
political, religious, or other comment, or an account of the 
queen's last progress. Within this range almost every con- 
ceivable variety of writing is possible: anecdote, from the jest- 
book or piece of rimed doggerel to the prose tale of low life or 



104 THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

complete romantic story; realistic pictures and writings-up of 
contemporary rogues and vagabonds or exposures of the tricks 
of thieves and sharpers; "characters," biographies, travels, 
real and imaginary, autobiographical and other sketches. 
The pamphlet vv^as rarely political, for there v^ere pains and 
penalties attendant upon political freedom of speech, but it 
v^as often on matters of religious controversy, social satire, and 
personal lampoon. We are as apt to forget all this in thinking 
of the great age of Spenser and Shakespeare as we are apt to 
forget those clogs about the necks of our own culture, the com- 
moner newspapers, the commoner books, and the common 
thoughts with which they overlay and overwhelm us. Though 
just as now there are able men who give their best talents to 
our own daily and monthly press, so in the old time an occa- 
sional man, capable of enduring work, bartered his talents to 
the needs of the moment and rested content with the repute 
of a day. 

All this is incipient journalism, only requiring a keener 
interest in that modern acquired need of our daily lives which 
we call news, the organization by which that need is supplied, 
and regular publication assured, completely to parallel the 
modern newspaper. Much of this fleeting literature has per- 
ished and much more of it was produced by anonymous au- 
thors or by those whose names are now practically forgotten; 
and yet enough remains to surprise us with its bulk and variety 
and with the productiveness of some of those who contributed 
to it. Thus, for example, an enumeration of the jest-books 
that appeared in print between the time of Shakespeare's corn-: 
ing to London and the year of his death comprehends a dozen 
or more titles in which the names of Skelton, Scoggin,andTarl- 
ton recur. Peele, the dramatist, was notorious for his Merry 
Conceited Jests, collected in 1607; and Richard Edwards, in ■ 
his day, and Robert Armin, a later actor, contributed each 
his share to a variety of anecdote which neither then nor now 
is creditable either for its wit or its decency. Of wholesomer 
nature were the collections of popular tales, best represented 
in the work of Thomas Deloney, variously described as "a 
jig-monger" or "the balleting silk-weaver." This trades- 



THE PAMPHLETEERS 105 

man's laureate, as he has likewise been called, was the author 
of such books as Jack of Newbery, Thomas of Reading, and 
The Gentle Craft, all printed in the nineties and concerned 
with tradesmen heroes. It was from the last of these pam- 
phlets that Dekker borrowed the plot of his Shoemakers^ Holi- 
day, including the immortal personage Simon Eyre; and, in 
a second story of the same book, Rowley found the story of 
another play, his Shoemaker a Gentleman. As to the fecundity 
of some of these pamphleteers, it may be noted that the article 
on Thomas Churchyard, in The Dictionary of National Bi- 
ography, contains over fifty titles of works of his; Grosart's 
edition of Nicholas Breton prints some forty tracts in verse 
and prose, all of this general class; and the same editor's edi- 
tion of the prose writings of Robert Greene fills eleven crown 
octavo volumes. Greene and Lodge were more than pam- 
phleteers; for, aside from the plays of the former, each con- 
trived to give distinction even to some of his more fugitive 
tracts. Breton, too, concealed in much rubbish many a gem 
of dainty pastoral verse and discloses a pervading kindliness 
of spirit unusual in his class. While Thomas Nash, despite 
the rancor of his personalities and the passing and trivial na- 
ture of his controversies, must always be reckoned among the 
masters of vigorous, idiomatic English prose. 

Of the several pamphleteers, then, that it is here possible 
to notice, Thomas Churchyard was the earliest. An older 
contemporary of Gascoigne, born in 1520, but living on to 
1604, Churchyard affected the broadside in verse and was fond 
of historical and quasi-historical subjects. His best known 
work is his contribution of the story of Jane Shore to Bald- 
win's edition of The Mirror for Magistrates, 1 563; but he like- 
wise told the vicissitudes of his own career as a soldier in 
Scotland, Ireland, and on the continent, describing the siege 
of Leith, "the lamentable and pitiful wars in Flanders," and 
the "calamity of France," this last in 1579. Somewhat later he 
wrote several tracts on the projected voyages of Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert and Martin Frobisher, moralized upon the late earth- 
quake, described the queen's progresses into the country to 
visit her nobles, and never lost an opportunity lugubriously 



io6 THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

to celebrate the obsequies of statesman or notable courtier. 
Churchyard affected the letter in his titles: Churchyard's 
Chipps, Churchyard's Choice, Churchyard's Chance, Church- 
yard's Challenge. His Worthies of Wales, 1587, is accounted 
the best of his works; their journalistic character is plain; for 
few events, from Sidney's death and the Babington conspiracy 
to Essex's folly, escaped his indefatigable pen. 

Nicholas Breton, though later born, was even longer lived 
and no less continuously industrious. Of better birth and 
greater refinement than Churchyard, Breton seems to have 
been urged to a literary career by the example of his step- 
father, the poet Gascoigne, who left him a love of learning 
although he dissipated his estate. Breton was a minor satel- 
lite of the charmed circle of the Countess of Pembroke to whom 
he dedicated more than one of his booklets; and his literary 
work extends from 1577 quite through the reign of King James 
to embrace much excellent devotional prose and poetry and 
several exquisite pastoral lyrics. Considering his volumi- 
nousness, Breton maintains a remarkable uniformity of style 
and diction. He was, moreover, a writer of unusual versa- 
tility, writing verse and prose, satirical, romantic, religious, 
and pastoral, with equal ease and success, and with a charming 
and equable flow of good spirits — cheerful, fanciful, and 
pathetic at will. Wit's Trenchamour, 1597, in its interlocutors, 
an angler and a scholar, and the talk about fish and fishing 
with which it opens, is suggestive of its famous successor, 
Walton's Complete Angler: but the dialogue takes a different 
turn. A Discourse between a Scholar and a Soldier, The Praise 
of Virtuous Ladies, An Old Man's Lesson and a Toung Mans 
Love are sufficiently described in their titles. Several of Bre- 
ton's pamphlets are satirical and three of these in verse contain 
the word Pasquil — Pasquil's Madcap, Pasquil's Fool's Cap, 
Pasquil's Pass — on their titles. But there is nothing bitter 
in Breton's nature; even his satire is full of humanity and 
kindly merriment, and the just and modest value that he puts 
on his own efforts, calling them Toys for an Idle Head, A Post 
with a Packet of Madcap Letters, I Pray Tou he not Angry, 



BRETON AND ROWLANDS 107 

Against Murmurers and Murmuring, disarms anything in the 
nature of hostile criticism. 

Among Breton's many dialogues, moral, fanciful, religious, 
and other, it is of interest to find several in form of short essays- 
imitating the manner and even the subjects of Bacon, Fan- 
tastics "discants of the quarters, months and hours of the year 
with other matters"; but Characters upon Essays, Moral and 
Divine, 16 15, not only deals with Baconian abstractions, such 
as Honor, Love, War, and Resolution, but is dedicated in 
respectful terms, confessing the imitation, to "my worthy, 
honored, truly learned and judicious Knight, Sir Francis 
Bacon." The Good and the Bad, a Description of the Worthies 
and Unworthies of this Age, 1616, partakes more of the variety 
of writing, recently come into the vogue of the moment in the 
"character," of which more below. Lastly, the larger class 
of Breton's devotional tracts, both prose and verse, exhibit a 
simple-hearted piety and kindly charity of heart which further 
endear this engaging old writer to our recollection. ^ 

Of less literary worth, though similar in his career, was 
Samuel Rowlands, whose activity lies between 1598 and 1628 
and who died two years later. Rowlands' productivity almost 
equals Breton's and includes many religious tracts and satires 
of such asperity that some of the author's works were ordered 
to be publicly burnt. Rowlands imitated greater men in a 
large group of writings on the low life of London, its thieves, 
beggars, and "roaring boys," as they were called; and a cer- 
tain ready-handed ability marks, as well his High Way to 
Mount Calvary, 'Tis Merry when Gossips Meet, as his Terrible 
Battle between the Tvoo Consumers of all the Earth, Time and 
Death. 

The greatest of the early pamphleteers is Robert Greene, 
whose place among the predecessors of Shakespeare has already 
claimed our attention. Greene's earliest prose work was 
written under the direct influence of Lyly whose style he imi- 
tated and whose long disquisitions on the nature of love and 
the processes of courtship he specially emulated. Greene's 
Mamillia was entered as early as 1580 and was followed, be- 



io8 THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

fore the end of the decade, by more than a dozen other love- 
pamphlets. Mamillia is the not ineffective story of a fickle 
and wavering young man, Pharicles, at length reclaimed to 
virtue and to matrimony by the beautiful and steadfast Mamil- 
lia. Among the others, Euphues his Censure of Philautus is 
interesting as an intended continuance of Lyly's famous story;^ 
Perimedes the Blacksmith contains in its preface much valuable 
matter by way of allusion to the contemporary relations of the 
predecessors of Shakespeare; and Pandosto is memorable for 
havins furnished in the beautiful tale of Dorastus and Fawnia 
no unworthy original of The Winter s Tale. Greene is often 
clever in the manner in which he frames or introduces his 
stories. Thus Planetomachia,zs its name imports, is a dispute 
amongst the planetary gods as to which had most potently 
affected the doings of men, and stories are told by way of illus- 
tration. In Penelope's Weh that dutiful wife discourses with 
her maidens by night, of love and adventure, as she unweaves 
the thread that she has spun all day; in Euphues' Censure thp 
interlocutors are the heroes of the Trojan war. Some of these 
productions are mere "dissertations on love clothed in a story." 
In nearly all, Greene holds up a high ideal of womanhood and 
maintains Lyly's conception of "a cleanly story fit for ladies' 
to read." 

With the threatened arrival of the Armada, Greene forsook 
love themes to sound the note of war. The Spanish Mas- 
quer ado is a book of the moment such as we might expect from 
a stanch patriot and Protestant in a time of national peril. 
"In the attempted invasion of the Spaniards he saw the hand 
of God directed towards England for the purpose of awaken- 
ing her religious enthusiasm; in Englishmen he saw God's 
weapon for the punishment of Spaniards for their pride and 
dishonesty." This production is only historically of any 
interest. 

Greene soon returned to his love stories, imitating the 
Arcadia in Menaphon, a pastoral of great beauty, esteemed by 
some the best of his work, and assuming a deeper and more 
moral tone in The Mourning Garment. Nor did he leave be- 
hind him a more charming and finished story than Philomela, 



PAMPHLETS OF GREENE 109 

which was written in the year preceding his death. Greene 
began now, too, to levy more and more upon his own adven- 
tures and experiences, and to dispute more deeply on vice and 
passion, as in his Farewell to Folly and in the two touching 
books, A Groatsworth of Wit Purchased with a Million of Re- 
pentance and Greene's Repentance, with which he closed his 
career. There remains a notable class of Greene's writings, 
the series which deals with the impostors and sharpers with 
which London was infested, the haunts and tricks of which 
Greene knew with the closest personal acquaintance. Some 
half-dozen pamphlets of various lengths on cosenage and cony- 
catching (the old words used to designate such deceits), belong 
to the years 1587 and 1592. They were followings of a type 
long since set, of which more below. Greene's handling of 
such topics is frank and realistic but never prurient or unclean. 
His words are marked by the same honest outspokenness 
and sincerity which characterized all his utterances concerning 
himself. It would be difficult to find a truer, a more whole- 
some story of a fallen and reclaimed womanhood than may be 
read at the conclusion of the tract called by the cumbrous title, 
A Disputation between a He-Cony catcher and a She-Cony- 
catcher; precisely as it would be impossible to find a more 
touching story than the autobiographical account which Greene 
gives us in his Groatsworth of Wit of his own pathetic and un- 
timely death. That story has been told so often that it may 
here be passed by and another passage preferred which almost 
equally expresses the nature of these autobiographical pamph- 
lets. After relating the careless wickedness of his life at the 
University of Cambridge and in Italy, his pose as a "mal- 
content," his extravagance in attire, Greene proceeds to tell 
how he became "an author of plays and a penner of love 
pamphlets," and one "young yet in years though old in wicked- 
ness." At this period, he continues: 

Yet let me confess a truth, that even once, and yet but once, I 
felt a fear and horror in my conscience; and then the terror of God's 
judgements did manifestly teach me that my life was bad, that by 
sin I deserved damnation, and that such was the greatness of my 
sin, that I deserved no redemption. And this inward motion I re- 



no THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

ceived in Saint Andrew's Church in the City of Norwich, at a lecture 
or sermon then preached by a godly learned man, whose doctrine, 
and the manner of whose teaching, I liked wonderful well: yea 
(in my conscience) such was his singleness of heart, and zeal in his 
doctrine, that he might have converted me, the most monster sinner 
of the world. ... 

At this sermon the terror of God's judgements did manifestly 
teach me that my exercises were damnable, and that I should be wiped 
out of the book of life, if I did not speedily repent my looseness of 
life, and reform my misdemeanors. 

But this good motion lasted not long in me; for no sooner had I 
met with my copesmates, but seeing me in such a solemn humor, 
they demanded the cause of my sadness: to whom when I had dis- 
covered that I sorrowed for my wickedness of life, and that the 
preacher's words had taken a deep impression on my conscience, they 
fell upon me in jesting manner, calling me Puritan and precisian and 
wished I might have a pulpit, with such other scoffing terms, that 
by their foolish persuasion the good and wholesome lesson I had 
learned went quite out of my remembrance: so that I fell again with 
the dog to my old vomit, and put my wicked life in practice, and that 
so thoroughly as ever I did before. 

Is it always necessary that we should remember Robert 
Greene as the man who first maligned Shakespeare, or even 
as the poet whose ungoverned life and repentant spirit has 
served to point many a moral and adorn many a tale ? Greene 
never ceased to look up. He never failed to adore the sun and 
the pitiful heavens, although his feet faltered sadly in the miry 
ways of the world. If we add our voices to the chorus of 
Shakespearean praise, may we not save a tear for this, his fallen 
rival ? 

Of Thomas Lodge as a poet, rare lyrist like Greene that 
he was, and memorable for delicate and charming Rosalynd, 
original of As Tou Like It, it is not the place to write much 
here. As to his prose, in his Defense of Plays, 1579, Lodge 
had taken a part, honorable to his taste and learning, in the 
controversy which Stephen Gosson had started concerning 
the wickedness of plays. The subsequent pamphlets of Lodge 
include a variety of stories and discussions more or less Euphu- 
istic or couched in the manner of Greene. Lodge was a far 



LODGE AND NASH iii 

traveler and wrote one story while at sea on an expedition 
against the Spaniards, another on a voyage while in the Straits 
of Magellan, entitled A Margarite of America, published in 
1596. This may be commended to those who think that the 
accident of geographical position should determine such ques- 
tions, as the earliest specimen of "American literature," as it 
preceded Sandys translation of Ovid made in the wilds of Vir- 
ginia by some twenty years, and Mistress Anne Bradstreet, 
"the tenth Muse, sprung up in America," by sixty or more. 

From these lighter pamphlets, the fringe of fiction, we turn 
to the more forbidding prose of controversy. In one of the 
latest of his pamphlets, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, 1592, 
Greene had incidentally described Gabriel Harvey, the Cam- 
bridge don. Mentor of Spenser and would-be intimate of Sid- 
ney, as "the son of a rope-maker of Saffron Walden," which 
unquestionably he was. Absurdly touched by this in his 
family pride, Harvey attacked Greene abusively in his Four 
Letters and Certain Sonnets, and it is even said visited the 
obscure lodgings in which Greene had meanwhile died to 
collect material concerning his wretched and unhappy end to 
_exult over. This conduct stung Nash to reply, not so much 
because he had been an especial intimate of Greene's as be- 
; cause he detested Harvey's conduct and recognized in him an 
excellent subject for his own satirical quill. Thomas Nash 
was born in 1567, a minister's son of Lowestoft. He left Cam- 
bridge prematurely, according to Harvey, because he had 
played "the varlet of clubs in a satirical Latin play called Ter- 
minus et non Terminus." The literar}'^ life of Nash in London 
began about the year 1588, and his first work was apparently 
The Anatomy of Absurdity. Nash was influenced in this work, 
as were others temporarily, by the fashionable mannerism of 
Lyly, though his vigorous prose was far from being subdued 
by Euphuistic affectations. In the Epistle to Greene's Men- 
aphon Nash reviewed contemporary literature with the vivacity 
and contemptuousness of extreme youth. It is notable though 
that the young critic attacks the abuses of the style of his day, 
especially the bombastic style of Kyd and the "Thrasonical 
huff-snuff," as he dubs it, of such translators as Phacr and 



112 THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

Stanihurst, while he lavishes eloquent words of praise on true 
poetry, and upholds patriotically the credit of England. To 
"our English Italians" who declare that "the finest wits our 
climate sends forth are but dry-brained dolts in comparison 
of other countries," Nash names Chaucer,Lydgate, and Gower; 
and he adds: "One thing I am sure of, that each of these three 
have vaunted their meters with as much admiration in Eng- 
land as ever the proudest Ariosto did his verse in Italian." 
And then he continues: 

Should the challenge of deep conceit be intruded by a foreigner 
to bring our English wits to the touchstone of art, I would prefer 
divine Master Spenser, the miracle of wit, to bandy line for line for 
my life in honor of England against Spain, France, Italy and all 
the world. Neither is he the only swallow in our summer. 

But to return to Nash's controversy with Harvey, it was in 
his Wonderful Astrological Predictions and Strange News of 
the Intercepting of Certain Letters that Nash assailed Harvey 
in 1 59 1 and 1592. Harvey replied in Pierce's Supererogation 
orNewPraise of an Old Ass; and Nash in the epistle to a serious 
book called Christ's Tears over Jerusalem offered honorable 
amends and reconciliation. But Harvey was not made of 
magnanimous stuff and stood in suspicion of Nash's offered 
hand, which Nash accordingly withdrew with dignity in a new 
epistle to the same work. So things rested until 1596 when, 
having heard that Harvey had boasted that he had silenced 
him, Nash put forth his Have with you to Saffron Walden, or 
Gabriel Harvey s Hunt is Up, "containing a full answer to 
the eldest son of the halter-maker." "For brain power, for 
prodigality and ebulliency of wild wit, for splendid fight," 
says Grosart, "for ridicule deepening into scorn, scorn rip- 
pling into laughter, for overwhelming absurdity of argument, 
and for biting, scathing words, this satiric book stands alone 
in the literature of its kind.'' Nor is this praise excessive. 
Upon the publication soon after of a weak reply by Harvey 
entitled The Trimming of Thomas Nash, the whole thing be- 
came a stench in the nostrils of the public and it was ordered 
by the Bishop of London "that all Nash's books, and Dr. 



MARTIN MARPRELATE 113 

Harvey's books be taken wheresoever they may be found, and 
that none of the same books be ever printed hereafter." This 
meant, after the quaint custom of the time, a public burning 
of all the confiscated copies of both books, a ceremony held 
at the Standard in Cheapside and superintended — at least at 
times — by the common hangman. 

But this v^as not Nash's only literary w^arfare. Elizabeth's 
system of uniformity in religion rested on compromise; and 
the grov^^th of Calvinistic ideas among the Puritans imperiled 
this equilibrium towards the end of her reign. The Puritans 
made episcopacy the especial object of their attacks because 
the institution savored, to their minds, of popery and upheld 
many usages under the Act of Uniformity to which they could 
not in conscience subscribe. The bishops, too, had other 
enemies besides the Puritans. Many a gentleman, ruffling 
it at court, recalled that his forefathers had founded his estate 
on the dismantling of monasteries; and would have been little 
loath to repeat a like spoliation of the church. Moreover, the 
pride and ostentatious wealth of some of the bishops must have 
raised the question among the poorer brethern of their own 
clergy as to the administration of Christian offices in a manner 
at times so unchristian. The Martin Marprelate Controversy, 
as it was called from the pen-name assumed by the authors of 
the attacking party, arose about 1588, among the Puritans, 
out of these considerations and especially in consequence of 
the immense authority which the union of church and state 
had thrown into the hands of the bishops of the Established 
Church. The Puritan party resented what amounted to the 
conversion of a difference in religious opinion into a capital 
crime; and being unable to reach the impersonal power resid- 
ing in the high commission, appealed in print from the crown 
to the people. 

For the control of political and religious opposition and 
criticism, the press had long been subjected to a rigid censor- 
ship, and the right to print confined to a designated number 
of printers in London and elsewhere. In 1585 Archbishop 
Whitgift took a new step against the liberty of printing by 
obtaining a decree of the Star Chamber which restricted the 



114 THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

right to print to London and the two universities. By this 
decree the number of printers was still further limited. Only 
a member of the Stationers' Company could maintain a press 
and, on misuse, this press was subject to instant confiscation 
under order to the warden of the company from the Bishop 
of London, who, with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the 
official Hcenser alone could authorize the publication of any 
book. None the less the Puritan party opened their press 
attack on the bishops, in 1588, with a violent dialogue, Dio- 
trephes, written by John Udall, a minister of Kingston, who 
had been dispossessed for his Calvinistic leanings. The press 
of the printer of this tract was broken up and he was deprived 
of his license. John Penry, a Welshman of reforming instincts, 
whose tract, The Equity of an Humble Supplication, had- been 
suppressed in the previous year, now took Udall's place in the 
van of the Puritan advance, while his party, nothing daunted, 
continued their attacks. Although the government sought to 
reach their masked enemies, tract after tract issued from a 
press moved from place to place and concealed in the houses 
of various country gentlemen. Among the pamphlets so pub- 
lished were Martin Mar prelate's Epistle, 1588, leveled against 
Dr. Bridges of Salisbury, Martin's Epitome and Hay Any 
Work for Cooper (both in the next year), the last a reply to a 
serious Admonition to the People of England by Thomas 
Cooper, Bishop of Winchester. At last the government suc- 
ceeded in seizing the press and in prosecuting, under torture, 
Barrow and Penry, two of the suspected writers, both of whom 
were executed. Udall died after leaving prison in 1592. This 
pamphlet war continued well into 1590; but it gradually died 
out in the following years. 

The merits of this dead question need not concern us. 
There can be no doubt as to the violence and scurrility of both 
sides. Who Martin Marprelate really was has never been 
ascertained. The nom de guerre probably covered the writ- 
ings of several persons. Among the popular defenders of the 
bishops, on the other hand, both Lyly and Nash were active. 
A pamphlet called Pap with a Hatchet, 1589, has been con- 
fidently attributed to the pen of the former. Nash certainly 



MARPRELATE TRACTS 115 

contributed no less than three such works in 1589 and 1590: 
A Counter cuff given to Martin Junior, The Return of Pasquil 
and PasquiVs Apology. A Mirror for Martinists, Martin s 
Month's Mind, and An Almond for a Parrot have also been 
assigned by some to Nash. Both Nash and Lyly are said to 
have ridiculed the Martinigts- in plays on the stage. The 
anonymous reply, Hay Any Jf'ork for Cooper, has been con- 
sidered the best of the Marprelate tracts themselves; Lyly's 
Pap, and the pamphlets of Nash, the ablest of the replies. It 
is of interest to note that Bacon, safe man of compromise that 
he was, raised his voice against this as against other religious 
contentions in his able Controversies in the Church, 1 589. Of 
the style of these papers in general it is not necessary to speak: 
they range through all the degrees of satire and burlesque to a 
grossness and acridity of personal invective which was in keep- 
ing with the coarseness of the times. One of Nash's editors 
condemns his author's "fine nose for the carrion of anecdote," 
and for the "terrorism" and literary blackmail of his malig- 
nant and vehement denunciation of the Martinists. In vio- 
lence and scurrility Nash little surpassed the violence of mili- 
tant Puritanism. 

But controversy was not the sum total of Nash's art in 
prose. His Christ's Tears over Jerusalem is a serious tract in 
which, under the guise of lamentation over the fate of Jeru- 
salem, the author bewails the woes and shortcomings of his 
own city and age. In the social and satirical pamphlets, 
Pierce Penniless and Lenten Stuff or the Praise of Red Herring, 
we have Nash's more characteristic work. Quaint learning, 
a keen and observant eye, much knowledge of the world and 
its ways, an exuberant fund of humorous anecdote, a clever 
power to give a witty turn to thought and phrase, and a copious 
command of the language of encomium and especially that 
of vituperation: all these things are characteristics of the 
remarkable prose of Thomas Nash. 

Lastly, there remains by Nash one piece of genuine fiction, 
Jack Wilton or the Unfortunate Traveler. This vigorous bur- 
lesque and melodramatic story has the distinction, as M. 
Jusserand has pointed out, of being the earliest picaresque 



ii6 THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

romance in the English language and the only production of 
its kind in its age. The Unfortunate Traveler relates the 
adventures of a lively stripling, Jack Wilton, w^ho lives success- 
fully by his wits in various parts of Europe. He begins as a 
page with tricks upon a tapster for which he is soundly whipped 
as he deserves; but, rising in fortune, becomes servant to the 
Earl of Surrey, elopes with an Italian lady, and actually passes 
himself off for the earl. It is worthy of remembrance that 
the adventures of Surrey in this book, like Defoe's Memoirs 
of a Cavalier over a century after, were taken as actual facts 
by later writers and incorporated in sage biographies. Indeed 
Nash shares with Defoe that delightful art of "grave, imper- 
turbable lying" or, to put it less opprobriously, of faithful like- 
ness to actuality in trifling details which is one of the most 
precious possessions of the true novelist. It is impossible not 
to deplore that talents such as those of Nash — his power of 
vision, his mastery over language,his gaiety of spirit, eloquence, 
and rapid ease — could not have been better enlisted than in 
petty ephemeral pamphlet warfare and in the exploitation of 
passing literary fashions. But when all has been said to mark 
these limitations and conditions of his art, Nash must remain 
conspicuous, nay unexampled, in the annals of English prose 
not only for his inexhaustible Rabelaisian humor, his merry 
malevolence, and for his confident mastery over the vocabulary 
of Billingsgate, but likewise for his power over the telling real- 
istic stroke and a copious flow of idiomatic vigorous English, 
alike removed from the alienisms of the Latinists, the niceties 
and affectations of the Euphuist, and the Arcadian flower of 
speech and ornament. Here is part of a humorous description 
by Nash of Harvey's bulky volume, Pierce's Supererogation : 

O 't is an unconscionable vast gorbellied volume, bigger bulked 
than a Dutch hoy, and far more boisterous and cumbersome than a 
pair of Swisser's omnipotent galleas breeches. But it should seem 
he is ashamed of the incomprehensible corpulency thereof himself, 
for at the end of the 199th page he begins with lOO again, to make it 
seem little (if I lie, you may look and convince me); and in half a 
quire of paper besides hath left the pages unfigured. I have read 
that the giant Abtaeus' shield asked a whole elephant's hide to cover 



PAMPHLETS OF DEKKER 117 

it, bona fide I utter it, scarce a whole elephant's hide and a half would 
serve for a cover to this Gogmagog, Jewish Talmud of absurdities. 
But one epistle thereof, to John Wolfe, the printer, I took 
and weighed in an ironmonger's scales, and it counterpoiseth a cade 
of herring and three Holland cheeses. You may believe me if you 
will, I was fain to lift my chamber door off the hinges, only to let it 
in, it was so fulsome a fat bona-roba and terrible Rounceval. 

Lastly as to Elizabethan pamphleteers, v^e turn to Thomas 
Dekker, who to his repute as the follower of Greene in the 
drama we must add that of the chief successor of both Greene 
and Nash in the pamphlet. Of the life of Dekker word will 
be found elsewhere; suffice it here to say that Dekker was a 
voluminous writer of pamphlets, upwards of a score being 
listed and accredited to his authorship between 1598 and 1637, 
the year of his death. Nor is their range less than that of 
previous pamphleteers. Thus Canaan's Calamity and The 
Four Birds of Noah's Ark are devotional, respectively in verse 
and prose. The Wonderful Tear is a vivid picture of the low 
life of London, especially of London lying sick with the plague, 
from which Defoe, in his Journal of the Plague, disdained not 
to borrow. The Bachelor s Banquet is a free adaptation of a 
well-known French tract, Les quinze joyes de marriage, while 
the delightfully satirical Gulls' Hornbook, in which the Jaco- 
bean gallant is anatomized in all his folly, is an equally free 
rewriting of Dedekind's Grohianus. Dekker worked once 
more the rich vein of Greene's conycatching tracts in his 
Bellman of London and its several additions and amplifications, 
and he diversified all with his ready wit, his fund of anecdote, 
and the occasional play of a poetical spirit which we must 
lament to find thus wasted on mere production of copy. Dek- 
ker's pamphlets are an invaluable fund of information on 
contemporary social manners and customs and have yet to 
offer much in their obscurer parts to a fuller understanding 
of the greater works of the age. For example, the single little 
chapter, now very well known, in The Gulls' Hornbook, which 
tells "how a gallant should behave himself at a playhouse," 
contains a mine of information concerning the theater of 
Shakespeare, its settings, the price of admission, how the gal- 



ii8 THE PROSE OF CONTROVERSY 

lants abused the privileges of the stage, how the unfortunate 
playwright and actor were beholden to them not only for their 
patronage but for permission to be heard at all, and other like 
matters. 

As I open at random one of the five volumes of a modern 
edition of Dekker's prose, I find an account of the poet's visit 
to the Bear Garden on the Bankside where the bear set upon 
by dogs puts the visitor in mind of "hell, the bear . . . like 
a black rugged soul that was damned and newly committed 
to the infernal churls, the dogs, like so many devils in- 
flicting torments upon it." And much pity is moved in the 
author's humane breast when "a company of creatures that 
had the shapes of men and the faces of Christians 
took the office of beadles upon them and whipped Monsieur 
Hunkes," the famous blind bear, with long sticks till the blood 
ran from his hairy shoulders. It was not for the bear that the 
later Puritans condemned the royal game of bear-baiting. In 
another place we read: 

Thus sports that were invented for honest recreation, are by the 
wicked abusing of them, turned to men's confusion: and not only in 
these games before rehearsed, but also in those that are both more 
laudable and more lawful. For in the tennis court, cheating hath a 
hand; yea, and in shooting (which is the noblest exercise of our 
English nation), arrows do now and then fly with false feathers. 

Could anything have a more modern ring .'' 

But the pamphleteers could occasionally rise above con- 
temporary conditions. Many are the passages of memorable 
eloquence that might be culled from their works. Here is a 
rhapsody of Nash on poets, with which this chapter may well 
conclude: 

Destiny never defames herself but when she lets an excellent poet 
die. If there be any spark of Adam's paradised perfection yet em- 
bered up in the breasts of mortal men, certainly God hath bestowed 
that, his perfectest image, on poets. None can come so near to God 
in wit, none more contemn the world. Seldom have you seen any 
poet possessed with avarice; only verses he loves, nothing else he 
delights in. And as they contemn the world, so contrarily of the 



THE PAMPHLET 119 

mechanical world are none more contemned. Despised they are of 
the world because they are not of the world. Their thoughts are 
exalted above the world of ignorance and all earthly conceits. As 
sweet angelical choristers they are continually conversant in the 
heaven of arts. Heaven itself is but the highest height of knowlege. 
He that knows himself and all things else knows the means to be 
happy. Happy, thrice happy are they whom God hath doubled his 
spirit upon and given a double soul unto to be poets. 



( 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PASTORAL LYRIC AND THE SONNET^ 

THE age of Elizabeth was above all the age of song. 
Music then flourished as a diversion and accomplish- 
ment to a degree w^hich has not been known since in England; 
and that form of poetry which is nearest to music, the lyric, 
reached a height as memorable for its variety as for its ex- 
traordinary excellence. A lyric is primarily a poem that sings, 
as an epic is primarily a poem that tells. But while the song- 
like quality deserves all the emphasis which it has received, 
the modern lyric demands an equal recognition of the sub- 
jective or personal quality which characterizes it. The lyric 
is concerned with the poet and with the interpretation of his 
thoughts, sentiments, and emotions. It is the inward world 
of passion and feeling that is here celebrated, as opposed to 
the outward world of sequence in time. It is the individual 
singer, dignified by the sincerity and potency of his art, that 
unfolds his own moods and emotions to our sympathy and 
understanding, not a mere voice, the instrument by which 
we are introduced to the protracted wanderings of Ulysses 
or the heroic deeds of Beowulf. Several corollaries follow 
from this conception of the dual character of the lyric. It 
must deal with passion and emotion in their simplicity as 
contrasted with the drama which is busied with both in their 
complexity. TieJ[yric_j3justJbe-,exnotjon clothed in beautiful 
and musical language; it must be free from the intrusion of 
mere story or mere description, except so far as each may serve 
as the foundation of a mood. Above all, it must remain free 
of any intent to teach, argue, or explain; for its address is 
ultimately, like that of all true art, an address to the feelings, . 
to the emotions, and only mediately to the understanding- 
Inasmuch as the lyric demands a grasp of the subtler forms 

^ The initial paragraphs of this chapter are based on the author's 
Introduction to Elizabethan Lyrics, 1895. 

120 



NATURE OF THE LYRIC 121 

of human passion and emotion, combined with a consummate 
mastery of form and of the music of speech, it is but natural 
that all literatures should displaj/^^ the lyric among the latest 
onTterafjTgrowtFs. "TJespite what must be admitted as to an 
inTpeTsonaFTyrical quality inhering in much early popular 
poetry, an age, in which the gift of lyric expression is widely 
diffused, must be alike removed from the simplicity and imma- 
turity which is content to note in its literature the direct 
effects of the phenomena of the outside world and no more, 
and from that complexity of conditions and that tendency to 
intellectualize emotion which characterize a time like our own. 
In an age lyrically gifted, we may look for innumerable points 
of contact between the spirit of the time and its literature, for 
the most beautiful and fervent thoughts couched in the most 
beautiful and fervent language; in such an age we may expect 
the nicest adjustment and equilibrium of the real and the 
ideal, each performing its legitimate function and contributing 
fn due proportion to the perfect realization of truth in its 
choicest form, beauty. Siich an age was that of the Eliz- 
abethan lyric, whicH bloomed with a flower-like diversity of 
form, color, and fragranee from the boyhood of Shakespeare 
far into the century that knew Milton and Dryden. 

The origin of the modern lyric of art in the poetry of Wyatt, "^ 
Surrey, and their followers has already been sufficiently indi- 
cated. iTotteVs Miscellany is the first book of modern English 
lyrical j5oetry, and it includes what the following generation 
regarded as the best of the lyrical output of the reign of Henry 
VIII. Although The Paradise of Dainty Devises, published 
in 1576, gathered what was intervening, and although the 
lyrics of Gascoigne, Turberville, and some few others, their 
contemporaries, deserve consideration, the outburst of the 
true Elizabethan lyric scarcely preceded that of other forms 
of the literature of the century. In 1575, Spenser, Greville, 
Lodge, and Greene were already at Cambridge, whilst Lyly, 
Peele, and Watson remained at Oxford, which Sidney had 
just quitted to be introduced at court and to proceed upon his 
foreign travels. The influences that made these men poets 
were thus at work while they were students at the universities, 



^3 



122 THE PASTORAL LYRIC 

and within the ten years that followed each had made a name 
for himself in literature. 

The Elizabethan lyric, with all its variety and its fre- 
1 , quently high poetic attainment, is peculiarly conventional 
and imitative of precedent and example. For this reason we 
find it subject to a succession of fashions as to form and man- 
ner, following now the dainty unrealities of the pastoral mode, 
then inclosed within the formal bounds of French and Italian 
sonnet practice, and again fashioning its winged words to 
be set to music. 

From 1580 to j^^Oj, jfor^jej^ample^ it was the^ custom to 
express lyrical sentiment for the most part in the terms of tlie 
pastoral. The world became a glorified sheep-walk, its 
inhabitants nymphs and shepherds devoted to the cult and 
sway of love, and flitting their time carelessly away in dis- 
cussions of the divine passion combined with a convention- 
alized appreciation of flowers and fine weather. The pastoral 
mode, to be sure, was by no means confined, in England or 
elsewhere, to the lyric. Originating in Italy with the revival 
of an interest in ancient poetry, especially the Georgics and. 
Bucolics of Vergil, the pastoral took many forms, such as the 
\] eclogue, pastoral drama, prose romance, and lyric. All of 
these spread to France and Spain, and later reached England 
in as great a variety as that in which they flourished abroad. 
We have thus the eclogue, illustrated in The Shepherds' 
Calendar; the pastoral romance told in prose in Lodge's 
Rosalynd; glorified into a tale of valor and adventure as in the 
Arcadia; and told in verse and allegorized into a moral scheme 
of life in The Faery Queen. Again, there is the pastoral 
drama, which came for the most part later. The pastoral 
■J lyric occurs first as an incidental song in the midst of the 
narrative or descriptive eclogue and continues in this use in 
the romance, eclogue, and masque, only later developing 
into a separate poem free from special application. Spenser 
was the first English pastoralist to include songs in differing 
meters within the dialogue of the eclogue. Such are the 
"Song to Eliza" and "The Lament for Dido" in "April" 
and "November" respectively of The Shepherds' Calendar. 



THE PASTORALISTS 123 

Similarly, Sidney inserted many lyrics in the prose of his 
Arcadia. Spenser never wrote a lyric for its own sake. Nor 
did Sidney nor Shakespeare, very often, for that matter. All 
Spenser's lyrics are incidental, like the two songs just men- 
tioned, or of specific application like the larger Prothalamion 
and Epithalamion, and even the Amoretti, if we consider that 
sequence as a whole. The influence that separated the lyric 
from its place in the eclogtieV TSfriance, or drama was its use >^ 
as"the words for music; and we find the pastoral tone showing 
itself in the first madrigals and songs intended to be sung and 
in the anthologies, such as England's Helicon, 1599, in which 
occur several poems, parted from their context. 

Coming thus from Italy, where it had been cultivated for 
two or three generations, the pastoral lyric combined with 
a certain fantasticality, conventional phraseology, and fond- 
ness for conceit, a delightfully childlike abandonment to the j * 
sense^ a joy in beauty, light, and life itself which disarms the] 
very criticism which at times it deserves. Indeed, the average 
of this variety of lyric is not nearly so high as we might suppose. 
The lesser poems of England's Helicon — admirable collec- 
tion though it be at large — the volubility of Anthony Mun- 
day, the long-spun mediocrity of Nicholas Yonge, even the 
fluent but somewhat attenuated strain of Breton when he is 
not quite at his best, all go to attest the truth of this assertion. 
But if we turn to the greater men that practised the pastoral 
mode, or to the best work of many minor poets — Sidney and 
Spenser aside, to Lodge, Greene, Peele, Breton at his best, 
Barnfield and Drayton at times, even Constable, and Marlowe 
assuredly in one poem — we find the pastoral lyric rising 
above its conventions into the domain of the finest literature 
and exhibiting a simplicity, a freedom from consciousness, 
a happiness in metrical effect, an engaging sweetness and 
tenderness united with a love of nature, genuinely and artis- 
tically expressed. 

In time of yore when shepherds dwelt 

Upon the mountain rocks. 
And simple people never felt 

The pain of lovers' mocks; 



124 THE PASTORAL LYRIC 

But little birds would carry tales 

'Twixt Susan and her sweeting, 
And all the dainty nightingales 

Did sing at lovers' meeting: 
Then might you see what looks did pass 

Where shepherds did assemble, 
And where the life of true love was 

When hearts could not dissemble. 

Then yea and nay was thought an oath 

That was not to be doubted, 
And when it came to faith and troth 

We were not to be flouted. 
Then did they talk of curds and cream, 

Of butter, cheese and milk; 
There was no talk of sunny beam 

Nor of the golden silk. 
Then for a gift a row of pins, 

A purse, a pair of knives 
Was all the way that love begins; 

And so the shepherd wives. 

Thus sings that sweet pastoralist, JsTicholas JBreton, Nor is 
Robert Greene behind with the music of his "Shepherd's 
Wife's Song": 

Ah, what is love ? It is a pretty thing, 
As sweet unto a shepherd as a king; 

And sweeter too: 
For kings have cares that wait upon a crown. 
And cares can make the sweetest love to frown. 

Ah then, ah then. 
If country loves such sweet desires do gain. 
What lady would not love a shepherd swain .? 

And what lover of old poetry ever forgets "that smooth song 
made by Kit Marlowe," "Come live with me and be my 
love," so beloved of Izaak Walton; or Barnfield's 

As it fell upon a day. 

In the merry month of May, 

long and far from unreasonably attributed to Shakespeare 
himself? The pastoral mode continued in vogue to the end 



FULKE GREVILLE 125 

of Elizabeth's reign and after; but in the following decades 
it declined and soon ceased to be the dominant lyrical strain. 
But if this decade is superficially the period of the pastoral, 
there is in its poetry a deeper undertone not only in the artistic 
seriousness of Spenser, but in the sincerity and passion of 
Sidney, of both of whom enough has already been said. In 
the collection known as Coalica which embodies the lyrical 
poetry of Sidney's friend, Fulke Greville, there is a new and 
independent spirit, a widening of the sphere of the lyric theme 
to include non-erotic sentiment, and an all but complete 
abandonment of the classic imagery and allusion which long 
continued elsewhere to be one of the chief excrescences of the 
ornate and elaborated style of the time. The queen, with all 
the poetry of adulation that was lavished on her, was not 
often addressed in terms as cabalistic as these: 

Cynthia, because your horns look divers ways, 

Now darkened to the east, now to the west, 
Then at full glory once in thirty days. 

Sense doth believe that change is nature's rest. 
Poor earth, that dare presume to judge the sky: 

Cynthia is ever round, and never varies; 
Shadows and distance do abuse the eye. 

And in abused sense truth oft miscarries: 
Yet who this language to the people speaks, 

Opinion's empire, sense's idol, breaks. 

Some of the later lyrics of Greville have a fullness and 
intricacy of thought and a disdain for prevalent conventional 
poetical mannerisms that would do credit to Donne himself, 
who, whether influenced by a possible contact with the poetry 
of Greville or not, was at least of a kindred cast of mind. 
So, too, the devotional poetry of Robert Southwell, written 
mostly in the years immediately following 1592, shows an 
independence of the literary influences of the moment (save 
for the one matter of "conceit") that discloses how deeply 
that faithful priest and true poet was immersed in the mission 
that brought him undeservedly to a traitor's scaflFold. South- 
well was educated at Douay and took up, like Parsons and 
Campion, the dangerous Jesuits' mission of reconverting 



v/ 



126 THE PASTORAL LYRIC 

England. His two volumes, St. Peter's Complaint and Mccon- 
ice, appeared in 1595, the year of his execution. Southwell 
deserved the high repute in which he was held in his time for 
his fervor, originality, and genuine piety; and his use of an 
older fashioned verse, for the most part, than that of his immed- 
iate day did not obscure his worth. Even Jonson declared 
that although "Southwell was hanged, yet so he [himself] 
had written that piece of his, "The Burning Babe," he would 
have been content to destroy many of his [own poems]." 
Different in almost every respect from Greville and South- 
well, to whom poetry was the outlet respectively of philosophic 
ponderings and devotional yearni'ri^, was the poetry of Thomas 
Watson and of Barnabe Barnes who continue the Italian 
impulses given to English poetry by Sidney as Greville con- 
tinued Sidney's strength if not his fervor of thought. Wat- 
son'^. Hecatompathia or Passionate Century of Love was pub- 
lished in 1582 jand was thus-contemporary with, if it may not 
have preceded, the writing of Astrophel and Stella. Watson 
was a Londoner; he studied at Oxford and appears to have. 
died a young man about 1593. He is frankness itself as to 
his inspiration, ostentatiously noting many of his sources 
among Italian, French, and classical authors, and even occa- 
sionally ridiculing them. In 1593 Watson issued a second 
similar collection of amorous verse, this time in true sonnet 
form, which he called Tears of Fancy or Love Disdained, 
holding much the same attitude and pursuing the same method. 
But this time he omitted definite mention of his sources. The 
interests of Watson in foreign sources extended to music and, 
between the two volumes just named, he published a book 
entitled Italian Madrigals Englished, 1 590, thus taking his 
place (though only as a translator) as the earliest of a long 
line of lyrists writing words for music. Barnabe Barnes was 
born about 1569 and died in 1609. Barnes was the son of 
a bishop, an Oxford man, and much traveled abroad. As 
the friend of Gabriel Harvey he was traduced by Nash. An 
intimacy seems to have existed between Barnes and the minor 
sonneteer, William Percy, and both were mterested in the 
drama as well as in lyrical poetry. Barnes Parthcnop e and 



THE CONVENTIONAL "CONCEIT" 127 

Parthe?7ophil, j^g^, is a sgcj,ygncf pf sonni^^^ 
canzons, sestinas, and other poems of Italian forrn with whiqij 
he"'seerfre'Ti6rKav'e experinriented almost as fully as did Sidney 
The~re"di§'Ct5vety''of'Watson and Barnes within recent times 
has caused critics somewhat to overrate their facile ability 
to catch the general Renaissance spirit in its lighter moods, 
even although both poets justify praise by occasionally reaching 
high levels. 

But before we pass on to a consideration of the sonnet, 
a salient mannerism in the general poetical style of these 
earlier poets must claim our attention. In Elizabethan 
English the word "conceit^ meant commonly little more 
than idea, thought, or conception. It came, however, soon 
to involve the notion of wit, fancy, and ingenuity; and, as 
applied to literature and to poetry in particular, was used both 
of the thought itself and of the rhetorical device by means of 
which the thought was expressed. Gascoigne thus advises: 
"If I should declare my pretence in love, I would either make 
a strange discourse of some intolerable passion or find occasion 
to plead by the examples of some history, or discover my 
disquiet in shadows per allegoriam, or use the covertest 
means that I could to avoid the uncomely customs of common 
writers." It is this conscious avoidance of "the uncomely 
customs of common writers " that begets the conceit or, other- 
wise expressed, the effort on the part of the poet to deck out 
his thought in strikino;, apt, and oricrinal figures of speech 
and illustration. It is obvious that such an effort easily degen- 
erates ihtb ingenuity, far-fetched metaphor, extravagance, and 
want of taste; for all these things came in time to characterize 
the conceit to such an extent that the original idea was lost, 
and a conceit came restrictedly to mean "any conventional 
device of the poet — fancy, figure, or illustration — used to 
give individual, transcendant expression to the thing he has 
to say." The conceit was not the invention of any single 
English poet; nor is it any longer held that Gongora, or 
Marino, or any other foreign poet is specifically responsible 
for it in English literature; though it certainly developed 
under the influence of Petrarch and Tn the hands of his/-" 



128 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

in Italy, France, and England in their attempt to outdo the 
hyperbole of their master's ingenious imagery. 

As already intimated, to Sidney belongs the doubtCuI hoSLO*--- 
of popularizing the conventional conceit in England, and from 
his sonnets the conceit descended to His heifs, lawfully and 
unlawfully begotten, the sonneteers. But Sidney's own use 
of the conceit was not confined to his poetry. True, Stella's 
brow is alabaster crowned with gold, the door of her face is 
red porphyry locked with pearl, the porches (which endure 
the name of cheeks) are of red and white marble; her lover 
shares her heart and she yields him her frontiers; her eyes 
serve him with shot, her lips are his heralds, her skin his 
armor, her flesh his food; the ink as he uses it runs to Stella's 
name, pain moves his pen, his paper is pale despair. But 
in the prose of the Arcadia also, Urania, putting her foot in 
a boat is said to divide her heavenly beauty between sea and 
shore; Philoclea's hand at Zelmane's lips stands like a hand 
in a book pointed to noteworthy words; and Pamela's eyes 
dissolve in tears and leave only crimson circles behind.^ 
Outside of the sonneteers — of whom more shortly — ^Father 
Southwell elaborated the conceit m^^ extra vjagantly and at 
times absurdly. Christ's tears are pools of Heshbon, baths 
"oT^grace^wlTete happy spirits dive, turtle-doves bathed in 
virgin milk, and half a dozen other things as strange. He 
drinks the drops of the heavenly flood and bemires his Maker 
with returning mud; Peter's heart was not thawed by the 
fire before which he sat, its hell-resembling heat did freeze 
it the more. Drayton, too, though comparatively free from 
the conceit in Kis sonnets and pastorals, fell into the fashion 
in his Heroical Epistles, a work naturally pitched in a high 
key, though he later gave up the employment of such devices. 

The next decade, the last of the sixteenth century, is the 
time of the sonnet. Introduced into the language by Wyatt, 
first practised in sequence and raised to the standard of ex- 
quisite poetry by Sidney, the Elizabethan sonnet appears to 

^For the material of these paragraphs on conceit and these 
illustrations I am indebted to an unpublished paper on the topic by 
my friend and colleague, Professor C. G. Child. 



DANIEL AND CONSTABLE 129 

have owed, almost from the first, nearly as much to France 
as to Italy. The first and surreptitious edition of Astrophel 
and Stella, uttered by Nash in 1591, included not only Sid- 
ney's sequence, but "sundry other rare sonnets of divers 
noblemen and gentlemen," notably twenty-eight sonnets of 
Samuel Daniel. Daniel, an Oxford man of good family, 
had already been introduced at court and encouraged by the 
Countess of Pembroke. Daniel's inspiration is thus directly 
traceable to Sidney. At the time of this publication of his 
sonnets, Daniel was apparently abroad, as he appears to 
have acted at various times as a tutor to the young nobility. 
The poet resented this premature publication of his work, and 
in the following year put forth a true edition of his Delia, 
which included the sonnets already published together with 
many others and a narrative poem. The Complaint of Ros- 
amund. Daniel's poetry was so well received that in the next 
year, 1594, he issued another edition, called Delia and Ros- 
amund Augmented. Neither of these poems was without 
its effect upon the non-dramatic poetry of Shakespeare. 
And indeed Daniel deserved his popularity; for versatility 
of expression, choiceness and polish of diction, grace and 
leisurely dignity of style, all are his; though no one could be 
carried away by his fervor, and the flowers of his ornamenta- 
tion seem artificial at times. The same year (1592) brought 
forth Diana: the Praises of his Mistress in Certain Sweet 
Sonnets a short collection, afterwards enlarged and the work 
of Henry Constable who is described as "a Roman Catholic 
gentleman who lived much in exile by reason of his religion. " 
Constable was also highly esteemed by his age for his "pure,,^ 
quick arid high delivery of conceit," and he practised his art 
with a clearer understanding of the technical demands of the 
retrarchan sonnet than any man or his time. 

With Daniel and Constable begin dear traces of the 
ijnmediate influences of the French sonneteers on those of 
England. Even the titles of these two series are suggestive 
of their borrowings, the one from a series of dizains by Maurice 
Seve, entitled Delie, the other from Desportes' Les Amours de 
Diane. Michael Drayton too, in his Idea's Mirror, Amours in 



130 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

Quartorzains, 1 594, took over the title, L'Idee, from a collection 
of sonnets by Claude de Pontoux, 1579, and is otherwise 
indebted to the French poets. But the chief borrower from 
France in the sonnet, as in his other lyrical poetry, is Thomas 
Lodge whose Phillis Honored with Pastoral Sonnets, a pro- 
duction of no inconsiderable poetical merit, was printed in 
1593. Ronsard and Desportes especially were pillaged by 
Lodge; Desportes by Constable and Drayton; while Barnabe 
Barnes in his Divine Century, was more than inspired by 
Du Bartas and Jacques de Billy. But the Italians and the 
ancients were equal quarries for these free-booters of poetry. 
Aside from the universal imitation of Petrarch and his school, 
even Spenser disdained not to translate Tasso m sorne" oTTiis 
^moretti; ari37"tS^ "the* scandaT an3 employment of modern 
minute scholarship, he neglected to make note of his borrow- 
ings. When all has been said on this topic a protest must be 
raised, as it is not fair to make too much of a practice that was 
as common to the age and, in general, as ingenuous and free 
from concealment as piracy on the high seas against the com- 
merce of Spain. We have seen how Watson, in his Passionate 
Century of Love, ostentatiously noted the sources of most of his 
poems and even the details of his treatment. Watson differed 
only in this petty pedantry from his contemporaries and succes- 
sors in this art of lifting gold from the poetical coffers of those 
who have had the impertinence to precede us. We may doubt 
whether these foreign influences, so much exploited of late, 
did much more than "facilitate literary effort by providing 
plenty of material ready at hand," and justify Ben Jonson's 
recognition, among the "requisites" of a poet or maker, of 
imitatio, or the power "to convert the substance or riches of 
another poet to his own use. " 

Sonneteering now became the fashion, and sequence after 
sequence, in repeated editions, issued from the press. Drayton 
added the writing of sonnets to his multiform literary activities. 
Watson gave over Latin poetry and converted his translations 
into sonnet form, entitled The Tears of Fancy or Lo ve D is- 
dained. Giles Fletcher, in his Licia, turned from travel and 
diplomacy; the author of Zepheria and Sir John Davies from 



THE STRUCTURE OF THE SONNET 131 

the law; Spenser from epic poetry and Shakespeare from the 
stage to sonneteering; whilst every small gentleman, Percy, 
Lynche, Griffin, or Smith, in his Coelia, Diella, Fidessa, or 
Chloris, emulated the raptures of Sidney and the finished 
similitudes of Petrarch in the public poetical courtship of his 
real or imaginary fair beloved. 

The Italian form of the sonnet, as is well known, involved 
two parts, the octave and the sestette, the first displaying but 
two rimes, usually inclusive (that is, arranged ah h a ah h a), 
the sestette frequently three "^lor example, c d e c d e), but 
variously arranglS'a""^! here are many theories about the 
Italian sonnet; as a matter of fact, it was practised even among 
orthodox Italian poets with considerable freedom.-^ Wyatt 
attempted the Italian mode; Surrey frankly Anglicized the 
sonnet by converting it mto a series of three alternately riming 
quatrains, each with new fimes, followed and concluded with 
a couplet. And the majority of Elizabethan sonneteers — with 
Sidney, Constable, and Barnes as notable excep.tioris —- ac- 
cepted Surrey's form. This forrn {ah ah, c d c d, e f e f, g g) 
has been immortalized by Shakespeare, who. even emphasized 
, the effect of the final couplet by bringing the sense habitually 
to a pause immediately before it. It would not be difficult 
to argue that in substituting English habits of verse — such 
as the alternate rime {ah ah) for the inclusive {a h h a), such 
as the final couplet for the avoidance of it, and a variety oi 
rimes for the Italian paucity — the form practised by Shake- 
speare and his compeers represents a truer translation of the 
sonnet into English than a closer imitation of foreign exotic 
conditions. Opprobrious names belong, assuredly, to no 
sincere form of art^_^ Triumphant usage has hallowed the 
Shakespearean form of the sonnet. 

Elizabethan sonnet sequences fall naturally into certain 
well-defined groups. The majority are devoted to the celebra- 
tion of the passion of love: some, as Sidney's, Drayton's 
Idea, Spenser's Amoretti, and Shakespeare's, suggesting by 
means of successive lyrical moods a more or less connected 
love story, on greater or less probable basis in fact; another 
class dealing with the praises of a mistress or lamenting her 



132 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

hardness of heart, as Phyllis, Cynthia, and Diana or -Watson's 
Tears of Fancy. Another class are little more than loosely 
connected series of amatory verse, as Willobie's Aviso, 1594, 
J. C.'s Alalia, 1595, Breton's Arhor of Amorous Devices, 1597, 
or Tofte's Alha, 1598. Still others are collections of poems 
amatory and other, as Greville's Ccelica, having nothing in 
common vi^ith the sonnet except a certain unity of thought and 
brevity of form. Tv^o interesting short series of sonnets 
disclose a healthy revulsion against this excess of sentiinent 
and sugared similitude. These are Chapman's Coronet for 
his Mistress, Philosophy, I594> ^rid the Gulling Sonnets of 
Sir John Davies in the next year. The first appeals to a 
higher inspiration than that which animates the "Muses that 
sing Love's sensual empery, " and is a fine and elevated con- 
tinued poem, linked sonnet to sonnet by the repetition of the 
last line of the first to the first line of the next sonnet, and so 
on after the manner of .a "coronet." The sonnets of Sir 
John Davies, as their title implies, are pure "take-off" on 
the absurdities of the sonneteering tribe who were fair game 
for the clever courtier's raillery. 

But by no means were all Elizabethan sonnets amatory. 
Second, but far from unimportant, was the devotional or 
religious sonnet, often written in sequences emulating the 
length, if not the extravagances, of the amatory sequences , 
themselves; and sometimes, as in the case of Constable's 
Spiritual Sonnets to God and his Saints, in their day unpub- 
lished, and the Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets of Barnes, 
1595, the work of the same poets. The most persistent writer 
of devotional sonnets of his age was Henry Lok (or Locke) 
who printed, in 1597, Sundry Sonnets of^Christian Passions, 
"sundry" here equahng one hundred and one. A previous 
hundred, devoted to "meditation, humiliation and prayer" 
merciful Time has allowed to perish; but upwards of sixty 
more, denominated "a few to divers," were collected by the 
printer and reprinted in our own day. As to Lok, he appears 
to have been a good man, practising a kind of piety that makes 
this world a hideous place to live in. As to inspiration or 
the slenderest runnel of song, he has absolutely neither. 



"SPIRITUAL SONNETS" 133 

To have been born such a man as Lok in the age of Shake- 
speare was the very quintessence of the irony of fate. But 
Lok represents a dismal fall from the average poetical com- 
petency of Elizabethan devotional sonneteering. The "spirit- 
ual sonnets " of either • Constable or Barnes could furnish 
examples comparable at least with the average level of either 
in worldly poetry; while- the two short series of Donne, La 
Corona and his Holy Sonnets, both of questionable date, 
contain -individual poems wholly of Donne's great repute, 
as this famous Sonnet on Death will show: 

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; 

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow 

Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me. 

From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be. 

Much pleasure, than from thee much more must flow: 

And soonest our best men with thee do go, 

Rest of their bones, and souls' delivery. 

Thou art slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, 

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell. 

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well. 

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou, then .'' 

One short sleep past, we wake eternally. 

And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. 

The religious sonnet ran into hybrid varieties in some 
cases, as in .Thomas Roger's Celestial- Elegies in Quartor- 
zains, 1598, a mingling of the sonnet fashion with the obituary 
poem, so dear to the, age, in the .old edition bordered with 
black and embalmed, so tp speak, in a style suggestive of the 
Senecan-funereal manner of the Mirror for Magistrates or 
the lugubrious solemnity of Blair's Grave. In 1600 Breton 
used the sonnet form as the stanza for a continuous religious 
poem,, called The Soul's Harmony, and the second part of 
Davies of Hereford's fFit's Pilgrimage, in 16 10, is cumber- 
ously entitled Soul-Passions, "and Other Passages Divine, 
Philosophical, Moral, Pietical and Political." 

A third use to which the Elizabethan sonnet was put, 
was that of the occasional poem, most frequently in obituary, 



134 ^ THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

dedicatory, or other form addressing a patron. Roger's Ce- 
lestial Elegies, just mentioned, is an example of the extended 
use of the sonnet for the first purpose. Four sonnets "to 
Sir PhiHp Sidney's soul" accompanied the first edition of that 
poet's Defense of Poesy, 1 595. It was the fashion to prefix 
at times long series of dedicatory poems to important works. 
Among works, so introduced by sonnets, may be mentioned 
The Faery Queen, to the first three books of which seventeen 
sonnets were prefixed in 1590; and Gabriel Harvey's Four 
Letters touching Robert Greene, 1 592, which was opened with 
no less than twenty-three. Chapman's Homer, in 16 10, sim- 
ilarly contains fourteen dedicatory sonnets, later increased 
in number. Of a different type are the forty adulatory son- 
nets in form of a sequence addressed by Joshua Sylvester 
to Henry of Navarre "upon the late miraculous peace in 
France," in 1597. Although not sonnets in form, of similar 
adulatory character is Astrcea, a series of octosyllabic acrostics 
eulogizing Queen Elizabeth which Sir John Davies devised 
in 1599. In this Davies followed the model of a like series, 
called the Partheniads, by George Puttenham, written twenty 
years earlier but now lost except for some fragments. 

In the matter of conceit, the later sonneteers vied with 
each other to surpass in ingenuity both Sidney and his master 
Petrarch; and in the main they succeeded. Nor is it to be 
wondered that the conceit should develop most readily in the 
sonnet, where intensity of feeling, real or simulated, was 
compressed into a form and a mode of expression alike con- 
ventional and restricted. Among the sonneteers Daniel and 
Drayton, coming early, are^ss given to the conceit than their 
successors. From the excesses of the conceit Spenser's good 
taste largely preserved him; while Shakespeare, though by 
no means free either from the artificialities or even the triv- 
ialities of the sonneteering tribe, offers very few examples of 
"the elaborate inventional conceit," as it has been called. 
It is among the lesser men that we find the conceit in full 
blossom. Thus Constable declares that the basest notes of 
his Diana's voice exceed the trebles of angels; Giles Fletcher 
bids his mistress put down her fan from before her face and 



LESSER SONNETEERS 135 

put out the sun; and Tofte's Laura lays her handkercher to 
dry snow white on quicksedge wrought with lovely eglantine. 
The sun is slow, so she casts her glance upon it and dries the 
cloth, but burns his heart. Lynche's thoughts reach out 
beyond our planetary system to conceive of 

The tallest ship that cuts the angry wave 
And plows the seas in Saturn's second sun. 

The anonymous author of Zepheria thus rings ingenious 
change on an old theme : 

Let not Disdain (the hearse of virgin graces) 

The counterpoison of unchastity, 

The leaven that doth sour the sweetest faces, 

Stain thy new purchased immortality. 

'Mongst Delian nymphs, in angels' university, 

Thou, my Zepheria, liv'st matriculated 

The Daughters of ethereal Jove, thy deity 

On holy hill have aye perpetuated. 

O then, retire thy brows artillery. 

Love more, and more bliss yet, shall honor thee. 

The after-history of the sonnet is not long. In 1604 
Sir William Alexander, the friend of Drummond, published 
a series of a hundred or more sonnets under the title o£ Aurora. 
The collection is interspersed with a few songs and elegies, 
and formally inscribed to the Countess of Argyle. Alexander's 
poetry is decorous and graceful, and clearly modeled on 
French examples. The sequence was probably written 
within the period of the sonnet. The sonnets of Drummond 
are scattered through his poems and belong, like the few of 
William Browne of Tavistock, to the first decade of the reign 
of Jamqs. Of Davies of Hereford's large collection. Wit's 
Pilgrimage, i6io, devoted, with even-handed justice, half to 
love and half to religion, mention has already been made. A 
few rare little volumes, not strictly of sonnets, but protracting the 
impetus of the sonnet, are Daiphantus or the Passions of Love, 
by Anthony Scoloker and Breton's The Passionate Shepherd, 
both in 1604; Dolarnys Primrose, by John Reynolds, 1606; and 
long after, George Wither's Fidelia, 16 17, and Fair Virtue, 
the Mistress of PhW Arete, 1622. It is altogether likely that 



136 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

the exquisite love poetry of these last two works of Wither was 
written early in the reign of King James and before Puritanism 
had acidulated the nature of that sweet singer. DaYphantus 
is memorable for one superlative serious poem, entitled "The" 
Passionate Man's Pilgrimage," later printed as Sir Walter 
Raleigh's among his Remains. This poem is tuned to the 
high and insolent vein which his contemporaries ascribed to 
the Muse of Raleigh and deserves a place beside the equally 
vigorous indignation of his most popular poem, "The Lie." 
A tradition that "The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage" was 
written by Raleigh in the Tower in expectation of the imme- 
diate execution that threatened him in 1603, adds to the 
poignancy of his words. The poem is too long to quote here 
entire. These are some of the lines of it: 

Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, 
My staff of faith to walk upon, 

My scrip of joy, immortal diet. 
My bottle of salvation, 

My gown of glory, hope's true gage; 

And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. 

Blood must be my body's balmer, 

No other balm will there be given; 
Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer, 

Traveleth towards the land of heaven; 
Over the silver mountains. 
Where spring the nectar fountains: 
There will I kiss 
The bowl of bliss; 
And drink my everlasting fill 
Upon every milken hill: 
My soul will be a-dry before; 
But after, it will thirst no more. 

From thence to heaven's bribeless hall, 

Where no corrupted voices brawl; 

No conscience molten into gold, 

No forged accuser bought or sold. 

No cause deferred, no vain-spent journey: 

For there Christ is the King's Attorney. 



DRAYTON'S "IDEA" 137 

Be thou my speaker, taintless pleader, 

Unblotted lawyer, true proceeder! 

Thou giv'st salvation even for alms; 

Not with a bribed lawyer's palms. 

And this is mine eternal plea 

To him that made heaven, earth and sea. 

That, since my flesh must die so soon, 

And want a head to dine next noon. 

Just at the stroke, when my veins start and spread. 

Set on my soul an everlasting head. 

Then am I ready, like a palmer fit. 

To tread those blest paths which before I writ. 

To return to the sonnet sequences of amatory import, 
five of them stand out distinct in poetical merit above the 
rest: these are, in order of time, Sidney's Jstroj^hel^D^^niel^s^ 
Delia, Drayton s'TJea^'^tfie y/morHfz of Spenser, and the iSon-^. 
jiets of Shakespeare. Of the first tv^o enough has been said 
in'Thfe"*b'o5fe'' '-'Mtdhael Drayton's career in poetry was to be 
a long and honorable one, for to him, as to the other poets 
just mentioned, sonneteering was but the passing fashion 
of the moment. In the longer reaches of his work, Drayton 
is a Spenserian, as shown in his love of allegory and the pas-., 
toral mode, the sweet continuousness of his measures, hi&,„, 
itataTa^felMity, even in his want of design and lengthy elab- 
oratehessT And for all these things in time Drayton's pop- 
uTarity^'eaTne to equal almost that of his master. But the 
earlier sonnets of Drayton preceded both Spenser and Shake- 
speare. Drayton's sonnets, judged as a whole, appear to 
echo successively Daniel, Sidney, and Shakespeare Drayton's 
Idea began with a few sonnets among several pastorals, pub- 
lished in 1593. In the next year, the sonnets were separated 
from the pastorals, augmented to fifty-one, and called Ideas 
Mirror, Amours in Quartorzains. With his sonnets, as with 
his other work, Drayton practised constant revision, omission, 
and addition, so that by the definitive edition of 16 19, Idea had 
come to contain many sonnets, written long after the sonnet- 
craze, while other earlier ones had been suppressed. Indeed, 
one sonnet of Drayton's (the one beginning "Since there's 



138 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

no help, come, let us kiss and part") which impressionistic 
criticism has discovered to be "so fine that nobody but Shake- 
speare could have written it," appears for the first time in 
this edition of 16 19, three years after Shakespeare's death. 
Drayton's sonnets in general have less of grace and art than 
those oT Daniel; at times they arirSSS'i^amewh^T^^ 
Despite their "originals," they seem less-Ilalianate than the 
earlier sequences, although their metrical facility and ease 
are prevailing, and two or three will maintain their place 
among the very best sonnets of their time. Many parallels 
have been found between the sonnets of Drayton and those 
of Shakespeare, and it would be difficult to prove Drayton 
always the borrower. The majority of such parallels, how- 
ever, are easily referable to the conventional poetical furniture 
of the time with which it was imperative that every well- 
turned sonnet-sequence be equipped; and some of Drayton's 
sonnets must have followed Shakespeare's. 

JJraytpn's/^^fl purports by its very title to be no morg^ 
than an objective expression of the poet's |deal of. jvomanhood.. 
Yet here, as elsewhere, the ingenuity of scholarship has dis- 
covered, or thought that it has discovered, references of sup- 
posedly autobiographical import. On this whole topic of 
the subjective significance of these sonnet-sequences, suffice 
it to say that it is as easy to interpret mere lyrical hyperbole 
into a chronique scandaleuse as it is temporarily to etherialize 
real human passion into what Bagehot called, in a different 
connection, "evanescent mists of lyrical energy." It does 
not seem altogether reasonable to deny the existence of an 
actual person inspiring a poet to become a sonneteer simply 
because he may have translated from foreign poets and bor- 
rowed the conventional ideas of his time as to courtship. 
Artificiality does not always equal insincerity and, although a 
poet may write without any objective undercurrent, that kind 
of undercurrent is assuredly not so rare, as the world goes, 
as to make every translator and imitator a pretender in affairs 
of the heart. On the other hand it is impossible not to sym- 
pathize with the frankness of the preface to Giles Fletcher's 



THE "AMORETTI" OF SPENSER 139 

sonnets to Licia, or Poems of Love "in honor of the admir- 
able and singular virtues of his Lady," 1593, wherein he 
writes : 

If thou muse what my Licia is ? Take her to be some Diana, 
at the least chaste; or some Minerva: no Venus, fairer far It may 
be she is learning's image, or some heavenly wonder: which the 
precisest may not mislike. Perhaps under that name I have shadowed 
[The Holy] Discipline. It may be, I mean that kind courtesy which 
I found at the patroness [Lady MoUineux] of these poems; it may be 
some college. It may be my conceit [i.e. fancy] and pretend nothing. 
Whatsoever it be; if thou like it, take it. 

The Amoretti of Spenser, a sequence of eighty-eight son- 
nets, appeared in print with Colin Clout's Come Home Again 
and the Epithalamion in 1595. Spenser published no other 
edition of his sonnets and they were not reprinted until the col- 
lective edition of his works in 1611. The Amoretti must have 
been written during the years 1592 to 1594, and thus they 
correspond in time with the height of the vogue of the sonnet. 
It was in June of the latter year that Spenser married Elizabeth 
Boyle, the lady indubitably addressed in these poems. A 
critical analysis of the Amoretti discloses that the series falls 
naturally into two parts, the second beginning with the sixty- 
third sonnet. Up to that point the sonnets are concerned 
with Spenser's courtship. In the second part, the lofty 
celebration of love's victory is the poet's theme. It is char- 
acteristic of Spenser thus to have continued his sequence. 
It is also characteristic of him not to have stopped at the 
eighty-fifth sonnet which is the real conclusion of the sequence, 
but to have added several sonnets, doubtless written at other 
times. Though perhaps in this we are wronging Spenser, as 
this feature of an irrelevant gathering in of sonnets, not related 
to the sequence and sometimes not even by the author of it, 
is a familiar feature of many collections, among them Shake- 
speare's, and may be referable to the printer. 

In the following sonnet there is less of the conceit and 



I40 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

convention of the species than we sometimes find even in 
Spenser: 

More than most fair, full of the living fire 

Kindled above unto the Maker near; 

No eyes but joys, in which all powers conspire 

That to the world naught else be counted dear; 

Through your bright beams doth not the blinded guest 

Shoot out his darts to base affections wound; 

But angels come to lead frail minds to rest 

In chaste desires, on heavenly beauty bound. 

You frame my thoughts, and fashion me within; 

You stop my tongue, and teach my heart to speak; 

You calm the storm that passion did begin. 

Strong through your cause, but by your virtue weak. 

Dark is the world, where your light shined never; 

Well is he born that may behold you ever. 

This other is closer to the spirit of Petrarch as interpreted by 
his imitators of the later Renaissance; but is a no less favorable 
specimen of Spenser's sonneteering art: 

Restore thy tresses to the golden ore. 
Yield Cytherea's son those arcs of love. 
Bequeath the heavens the stars that I adore. 
And to the orient do thy pearls remove. 
Yield thy hands' pride unto the ivory white. 
To Arabian odors give thy breathing sweet. 
Restore thy blush unto Aurora bright. 
To Thetis give the honor of thy feet; 
Let Venus have thy graces her resigned. 
And thy sweet voice give back unto the spheres; 
But yet restore thy fierce and cruel mind 
To Hyrcan tigers and to ruthless bears; 
Yield to the marble thy hard heart again: 
So shalt thou cease to plague, and I to pain. 

As to Spenser's "own marriage hymn of thanksgiving" the 
Epithalamion, beautiful if robust poem that it is, it has well 
been said that had Spenser "been silent, he would have felt 
that he wronged Hymen as well as the Muses." It was in 
this spirit that Spenser wrote the Amoretti which, despite 



SHAKESPEARE AND HIS PATRONS 141 

their delicate art and their many points of contact with Italian 
and classical poetry, can hardly be regarded as other than the 
genuine outpourings of a lofty and chivalric nature and of a 
quality, as poetry, second to the best of the sonnets of Sidney 
and Shakespeare alone. 

Despite some recent skepticism and scholarly Platonic 
suspicions we may reaffirm with confidence that Astrophel 
and Stella had its inspiration in a passion sufficiently real to 
take on a genuinely tragic tone to one of the ardent nature 
of Sidney. Spenser's Amoretti, too, won him the lady of his 
choice. What, then, of the sonnets of Shakespeare ? Are 
they, too, based on experience in life or are they mere literary 
exercises, compounded of shreds and patches, filched from 
French and Italian concettists where they are not the mere 
figments of an imaginative mind ? 

The life of Shakespeare will be best considered with his 
dramatic work later in this book. Whatever the precise 
time of Shakespeare's coming up to London and the condi- 
tions of his earlier life there, he must soon have learned some- 
thing more of the society of gentlemen and gentlewomen than 
could have fallen to the lot of one who saw such personages 
from the boards of the theater alone. We know that Shakes- 
peare found an early patron in the young Earl of Southampton; 
for Shakespeare dedicated both Venus and Adorns and Lucrece 
to him. Recently the Earl of Rutland (like Southampton an 
intimate of Essex and to become involved with him in his 
ruin) has been discovered to have been also a patron of Shake- 
speare. And while the matter is not susceptible of proof, 
there is surely nothing irrational in supposing that William 
Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, was likewise at some time the 
poet's patron, the more especially when it is remembered that 
Shakespeare's fellow-actors, Heming and Condell, thought 
Pembroke the fit person with his brother, the Earl of Mont- 
gomery, to whom to dedicate the folio edition of the dram- 
atist's works. 

Shakespeare was imitative in his earlier work. Titus 
Androntcus has already been mentioned as a case in point. 
We shall see soon how he followed the lead of Lyly in comedy 



142 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

and learned from Marlowe in tragedy and chronicle play. 
In his sonnets, too, Shakespeare followed the fashion of his 
time. And although they were first printed in a piratical 
edition, as late as 1609, there is every reason to believe that 
they coincided in point of the time of their composition with 
the general vogue of the sonnet and were well known by cir- 
culation in manuscript "among his private friends," at least 
as early as 1598. The Sonnets, Hke all other subjects connected 
with Shakespeare's name, bristle with difficulties, though 
most of them are of the commentators' own ^making. There 
is question about their dedication, about the way in which 
they came to be published, about the person or persons to 
whom they may have been addressed, about their order, their 
significance, and about the time when they were written. As 
to this last, opinion has just been expressed. The publication 
of Shakespeare's Sonnets is believed by some to have been 
procured, like the publication of many other Elizabethan 
books, by a personage who may be best described as a pro- 
curer of copy. It was the business of this personage to obtain 
"for publication literary works which had been widely dis- 
seminated in written copies and had thus passed beyond 
their author's control." Nash thus procured the publication 
of sonnets of Daniel, as we have seen above, much to that 
poet's disgust; and an earlier striking example of the same 
thing was Gascoigne's borrowing of the manuscript of Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert's pamphlet, called A Discourse of a Netv 
Passage to Cataia, and publication of it on his own account. 
According to this view, the "procurer of copy" in the case 
of Shakespeare's Sonnets was an humble person. A clerk or 
copyist, who was none too scrupulous, might have opportunities 
of acting in this jackal capacity that a more honest man would 
miss. The dedication of the sonnets to '^r. W. H. " as 
''the onelie begetter "is then regarded as referable merely to 
this bookseller's matter; and the actual name of "Mr. W. H. " 
— whether William Hall, Hart, Hughes or anything else — 
becomes a matter wholly negligible. The greatest difficulty 
which this theory escapes is the necessity of considering "Mr. 
W. H." to stand for "the Right Honorable William, Earl 



THE "SONNETS" OF SHAKESPEARE 143 

of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain to His Majesty, one of the 
Privy Council and Knight of the most noble Order of the 
Garter. " So to have misaddressed a peer of the realm might 
have been made a Star Chamber matter in Shakespeare's 
day. There still continue, how^ever, a few in the purlieus 
of scholarship who insist that "Mr. W. H. " is intended to 
indicate the Earl of Pembroke and that he was alike the ded- 
icatee of the Sonnets and their inspiring subject. That 
Shakespeare should have made no effort to interfere with the 
printing of his sonnets need excite no surprise. This whole 
matter of sonnet writing was at least a dozen years old in 
1609; and, with his greatest dramatic work behind him and on 
the point of retiring from the stage, Shakespeare could well 
afford to neglect these passages of his youth. 

Some other questions about the sonnets are not so readily 
disposed of. It will be remembered that the Sonnets of 
Shakespeare consist of two series the first, to cxxvi, "addressed 
to a youn^ man"; the second, from cxxvii to cIuT*' addressed to 
or referring to a woman." There is a greater connectedness 
in the first series; but neither are arranged in consecutive 
order and even this general division is not wholly justified 
in every case. Moreover not a few of the sonnets, especially 
towards the end, seem thrown in haphazard. By some, 
among them the great poet Browning, Shakespeare's Son- 
nets have been thought to detail matters purely imagi- 
native; by others to be dramatic exercises as free from 
autobiographical allusions as the plays themselves, though 
perhaps written to serve the purpose of some other lover than 
Shakespeare, possibly the Earl of Southampton. Again, 
several writers, mostly German, have discovered an allegorical 
interpretation for the sonnets, making the "Mr. W. H. " 
of the dedication stand for "William Himself" and finding 
nature, romanticism, Greek art, and what not, after the man- 
ner of the second part of Goethe's Faust, locked up in the 
cabalistic lines of the poet. As the young man is fair and 
the lady dark, it might as logically be suggested that we have 
here a myth of the sun god and that the dark lady is the god- 
dess of eclipse. 



144 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

Without going into refinements and combinations of inter- 
pretations, the story of the sonnets is neither difficult nor in- 
volved; sonnet cxHv, published by Jaggard in The Passionate 
Pilgrim, in 1599, supplies us with the. key. 

Two loves I had of comfort and despair; 

Which like two spirits do suggest [tempt] me still [ever]; 

The better angel is a man right fair 

The worser spirit a woman, colored ill. 

The poet has become the devoted frig^d^ of a youth much 
younger than himself and of a station in life aKove^THTI ST 
much the same time he yields to a passionate infatuation for 
a dark lady who keeps both men in her toils to their undoing. 
The first group of sonnets details the growth and fluctuations 
of the poet's affection for his friend (which in the parlance of 
the time is continually called love), an affection which has 
endured three years, which has been menaced by favors 
bestowed upon another poet (variously identified with Daniel, 
Chapman, or Barnes), and by fhe''dTtftfW§^^ 
"'*"aBs^enceJTiis FrlenH has sought to become his rival in the favor 
'■"of his mistress. The sequence ebbs and flows with the emo- 
tions of the poet, now exultingly promising immortality to 
the subject of his praise, at other moments reproaching him 
for sensuality or for patronage bestowed on his rivals, des- 
pairing of himself, his profession as actor, and of the ag«, and 
longing for death; again returning to protestations of unfalter- 
ing love and constancy in friendship. The second series 
deals more briefly with the poet's passion for his mistress 
whose "blackness" — to use the Elizabethan word — he 
extols above the lily fairness of other men's beloveds; whom 
he reproaches for her unfaithfulness and for the wreck which 
she finally makes of the devotion of his friend as well as of 
his own. 

Without returning to the various identificatioi:iSj,if_ the 

..sonnets be of autobiographical import, Southampton is the 

fairest claimant for the role of Shakespeare's friend and~p5t- 

„ron, as he is known to have been both. Some still prefer, 

^^^ however, as we have seen^ the Earl of Pembroke. There ~aTe 



THE "SONNETS' OF SHAKESPEARE 145 

difficulties in both interpretations. As to sirens, the court 
or Elizabeth was fuller of them than was ever the JEgezn; 
and for my part I should be sorry to have the mask of anon- 
imity torn from the face of this immortal shadow. 

In the autobiographical interpretation of the sonnets one 
thing is to be noted. The tale is a tragedy; and it could only 
be such because its chief actor recognized to the full the dis- 
tinction between good and evil and shows them to us in mortal 
struggle. The outcome is not told us; that evil did not ulti- 
mately triumph to the hopeless corruption of that great spirit, 
we have the true and noble ethics of his later works to prove. 
Is our Shakespeare less that he was tested in the fiery furnace 
of temptation which consumes the heart of man like chaff, and 
came forth refined and chastened from the ordeal ? Must we 
always put aside our charity when we judge the great ? And 
is that which is imperishable and immortal impaired by sharing 
that mortality which is ever man's whether in greater or less 
degree ? These are some of the questions which we should 
ask ourselves and in the answers which we can give to them 
abide content with what we have before us and not seek to 
explain away what does not comport with our own precon- 
ceptions. 

As a sequence the Sonnets of Shakespeare are not pleasing. 
The story is not attractive, nor the uncontrol with which it 
is told. It produces the effect of a vivid, terrible, and confused 
dream; its very beauties seem the flowers of a heated and 
overwrought imagination; and while it strikes one in only a 
few of its interpolated notes as unreal, there is a distortion 
about it. As a sequence J strop hel and Stella is preferable; 
and we can understand why Hallam said of the sonnets: 
"It is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never 
written them. " But if we come to the consideration of in- 
dividual sonnets, here is Shakespeare preeminent. Unequal 
as the sonnets are, considered together, — some of them on 
a level with Lynche or Barnes — there remains a collection, 
the poetic excellence, the masterly touch and truth of which 
no other poetry of the Elizabethan age can approach. More- 
over their range is as various as their excellence is superlative, 



146 THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET 

now trifling with words or punning on his name, now play- 
fully satirical, now rising to the impassioned strains of ecstatic 
joy and confidence, now in the slough of despond or remorse 
and fraught with that deep e xperience in lif e which makes 
Shakespeare the greatest of all poets. 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, 

I all alone beweep my outcast state, 

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, 

And look upon myself and curse my fate, 

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope. 

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed. 

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope. 

With what I most enjoy contented least; 

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising. 

Haply I think on thee, and then my state. 

Like to the lark at break of day arising 

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; 

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings 

That then I scorn to change my state with kings. 

No longer mourn for me when I am dead 

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell 

Give warning to the world that I am fled 

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell; 

Nay, if you read this line, remember not 

The hand that writ it; for I love you so 

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot. 

If thinking on me then should make you woe. 

O, if, I say, you look upon this verse 

When I perhaps compounded am with clay. 

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse. 

But let your love even with my life decay. 

Lest the wise world should look upon your moan, 

And mock you with me after I am gone. 

The fervor, the music, the distinction of these lines, may be 
equaled, though not surpassed, again and again among these 
exquisite lyrics. Can poems such as these be conceived as 
mere literary exercises. Inspired in the passing fashion of the 
moment and bearing no freight of an actual experience in life ? 
And yet could not the mind that fashioned, as from within. 



THE "SONNETS" OF SHAKESPEARE 147 

alike the doubts and questionings of Hamlet and the unimagi- 
native certainties of Henry V, the wicked egotism of lago, and 
the benign magnanimity of Prospero, — and this though he 
was neither Prospero, lago, Henry, nor yet Hamlet, — could 
not this man have written even these sonnets without once let- 
ting us into the veritable secrets of his great and mysterious 
soul? The question is insoluble; and it is better so. It is 
well that there should still remain some mysteries which 
the prying scrutiny of research must leave among the 
riddles of time. 



CHAPTER IX 

SHAKESPEARE IN COMEDY AND IN 
CHRONICLE HISTORY 

IN two of the preceding chapters of this book the earlier 
history of the drama in Elizabeth's reign has been traced, 
first with Lyiy at court and then with Marlowe and his fellows 
on the popular stage of London. We turn now to the often 
told story of Shakespeare, especially in what we may reason- 
ably reconstruct concerning the earlier half of his life and 
career as a dramatist. 

It is a commonplace of literary biography that the mate- 
rials out of which to construct a life of Shakespeare are exceed- 
ingly scant; scantier, it is sometimes added, than similar 
data concerning other men, his associates and contempo- 
raries. The statement is not borne out by the facts. The 
material as to Shakespeare's life, even unembellished, is not 
inconsiderable; and it is a mistake to suppose the sub- 
ject closed. There are, for example, some one hundred and 
seventy-five separate and individual evidences of Shake- 
speare's private life in the shape of official records, documents, 
entries, notices, and allusions, all of them contemporary. 
Most of these, as might be expected, have reference to his 
dramatic and poetic works, but twenty documents which 
concern his life and contain his name might be cited in any 
court of record to-day for the facts that they witness. Of the 
total twenty-six relate to births, marriages, and deaths; and 
five are evidences of ownership in the precinct of Blackfriars. 
The rest concern suits at law, and include a tax assessment 
when Shakespeare lived in the neighborhood of Bishopsgate, 
(though this has of late been questioned), certain deeds 
and mortgages, and his will. Most recently of all, we hear 
of Shakespeare as a witness in a lawsuit among the papers 
of which turns up a deposition, signed by his own hand, add- 

148 



THE LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE 149 

ing a sixth to the slender total of his other five signatures. 
According to this, Shakespeare lived, from 1598 to 1604, as a 
"sojourner" or sub-tenant in the house of one Christopher 
Mountjoy, a French Huguenot and prosperous tiremaker, 
at the corner of Silver and Monkwell Streets, in the parish 
of St. Olave, not far from Cripplegate.^ All this is a slenderer 
show of materials than that which we can scrape together con- 
cerning several of his contemporaries, statesmen, noblemen, and 
men of public service. We do not know as much about Shake- 
speare, for example, as we know about Sidney, Raleigh, Bur- 
leigh, or even Ben Jonson, who was much in the employ of the 
court; but we know far more of Shakespeare than we can 
glean of Marlowe, Webster, or Fletcher. In fact we know more 
of Shakespeare than we know of any other man of his time 
similarly circumstanced; and this is due not only to the indus- 
trious researches of the scholars and editors of three centuries, 
but to the indisputable fact that Shakespeare was interesting 
to his own age. 

The recorded facts of Shakespeare's life are familiar to all; 
"how he was baptized April 26, 1564, at Stratford, the son of a 
yeoman, John Shakespeare, and Mary, his wife; how he 
entered into a bond when scarcely nineteen to marry Ann 
Hathaway who was nine years his senior; how Susanna, their 
daughter, was born so soon as to explain the necessity of the 
irregularity of but once asking the bans; and how other 
children followed to increase the responsibilities of a husband 
not yet of age. There is record of young Shakespeare's con- 
sent in 1587 to the mortgage of property of his mother's at 
Ashby; and the scene then changes from Stratford to London. 
In 1592 comes Greene's allusion, in the Groatsworth of fVity 
enviously attesting Shakespeare's success as a playwright, 
with Chettle's recognition, in his Kind-Heart's Dream, of 
Shakespeare's standing as a man and an actor; the dedications 
of Venus and Adonis and of Lucrece to the Earl of Southamp- 
ton follow in the next two years. And now begin the entries 
of the Stationers' Register, first of plays, some doubtfully 

^ See C. W. Wallace, New Shakespeare Discoveries, Harper's 
Magazine. March, 1910. 



150 SHAKESPEARE IN COMEDY 

Shakespeare's and as yet without his name. Later his name 
appears with the titles, and popular plays run into six and 
seven editions during his lifetime, while piratical printers not 
only publish works that are Shakespeare's own (commonly, 
we may believe, against his will), but affix his name to plays 
with which he had nothing to do. Within the lifetime of no 
Elizabethan dramatist were half so many plays printed as of 
Shakespeare; and of no other playwright can it be said that 
his work was so often pirated or his name so frequently mis- 
used. This points to but one thing, the name of Shakespeare 
was a name to conjure with in his day; people wanted to read 
what they had heard of his on the boards. 

We know that this repute came in the first instance from 
the theater. In 1595 Shakespeare is mentioned in the 
accounts of the Office of the Revels; his membership in the 
leading theatrical company of the day, the Chamberlain's, 
is established by record in 1594; and he is named, especially 
as an actor in Jonson's Every Man in His Humor in 1598. 
Meanwhile there is evidence of his affiliation with his home 
and family in Stratford and of his increase in wealth and im- 
portance. His son Hamnet — strange variant of Hamlet — 
is buried at Stratford in 1596; and a draft of arms is granted, 
not to William, but to John Shakespeare, his father. In the 
next year the poet purchases the freehold of New Place, the 
finest house in his native town, and we hear of other purchases 
intended and consummated. There is correspondence as to 
the loan by Shakespeare of money and as to petty suits at law, 
brought and gained by him. Death comes to his family 
again, his father dying in 1601, his brother Edmund in 1607., 
his mother the following year. His first-born, Susanna, mar- 
ries in the former year and Shakespeare becomes a grand- 
father. There is the purchase of more land, of property in 
Stratford and in London, and there are legacies of friendship 
left to Shakespeare. At last there is his will, executed March 
25, i6i6j and on April 23, traditionally considered Shake- 
speare's birthday, the man is no more. These are the facts 
in the main. Into the traditions we cannot here enter. 

Books have been written on what Shakespeare learned at 



^*i^'^^.w 



SHAKESPEARE'S EDUCATION 151 

school; he learned more out of doors. Jonson said that he 
had little Latin and less Greek, and Aubrey gossips that he 
knew Latin pretty well. The two opinions tally, as Jonson 
and Aubrey viewed Latin from different quarters. The late 
Churton Collins, in a scholarly essay on the learning of Shake- 
speare, has quite upset the old notion that Shakespeare was 
unacquainted with the classical authors; but it may be sus- 
pected that Shakespeare never read a foreign book if he could 
obtain the matter that he wanted in translation. Shake- 
speare was not so learned a man as Ben Jonson, to say noth- 
ing of Camden or Bacon; but it has now long been exploded 
that Shakespeare was "a rude, natural-born genius," a 
species of inspired idiot who knew not the wise things tliat 
he "vyas uttering. As Bagehot so happily put it: "There is 
clear evidence that Shakespeare received the ordinary gram- 
mar-school education of his time and that he derived from the 
pain and suffering of several years, not exactly an acquaint- 
ance with Latin and Greek, but like Eton boys, a firm con- 
viction that there are such languages." Moreover the stamp 
of genius is on Shakespeare's life. He was not the man to 
submit to any real inferiority and, whatever his early defi- 
ciencies, the plays attest how he corrected them. There is 
no proof that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar 
school. He could have attended no other. There is no copy 
of William Lilly's Grammar extant which bears Shakespeare's 
signature. It is unlikely that he studied any other, for this 
was the approved Latin book of his day and long after. 

The happy and competent knowledge which Shakespeare 
exhibits of many subjects, some of them technical and pro- 
fessional, has led to a host of surmises as to his probable occu- 
pation after leaving school. He has been thought a farmer, 
a huntsman (which he certainly was), a lawyer, a printer, a 
soldier, an usher in a school, and a surgeon. Aubrey repeated 
an earlier tradition which made Shakespeare exercise his 
father's trade and added that "when he killed a calf he would 
do it in a high style and make a speech." We need not 
believe this story; indeed, we need not believe a word of 
Aubrey; but it has been well observed that this idle anecdote 



152 SHAKESPEARE IN COMEDY 

suggests at least the theatrical genius. Shakespeare used the 
picturesque Bible phrase of his time, not because he had 
studied for the Church, but because he was an Elizabethan 
with a memory for the phrase; he observed with marvelous 
accuracy the symptoms of insanity, not because he was an 
alienist but because he was observant of the psychology of 
man. As to his legal acquirements, Professor Raleigh re- 
marks that "it was not for nothing that Shakespeare was 
his father's son": and besides, Shakespeare had lawsuits of 
his own. A late discovery concerning him discloses a suit 
in which he was the successful plaintiff in 1615.^ As to all 
these surmises of Shakespeare's avocations, let them remain 
surmises. To him who laboriously acquires a petty barony 
in some little kingdom of knowledge, the grasp, the sweep, the 
accuracy of Shakespeare's perceptions must seem super- 
natural, if not based on diligent studies such as his own. 

Before we leave Stratford and the youth of Shakespeare it 
may be observed that many books have treated Shakespeare's 
nature-lore, his knowledge of animals, his acquaintance with 
birds, his insects, even his fishes. A delightful book. The 
Diary of Master William Silence, has shown the completeness 
of Shakespeare's knowledge of the contemporary nomencla- 
ture of the popular sports of hunting and hawking and his 
devotion to the horse. But Professor Raleigh has set us 
straight as to the nature-lore of Shakespeare which was clearly 
that of the keen but superficial observer, not that of the modern 
scientific devotee of nature study. Shakespeare wasted no 
time observing the habits of animals when men were to ob- 
serve. He makes plenty of mistakes in natural history and 
accepts the traditional qualities of the impossible beasts of 
the medieval bestiary, "the toad that wears a precious jewel 
in his head," "the unicorn that is betrayed with trees," "the 
basilisk that kills at sight"; but he makes no mistakes as to 
his men and women: there his touch is certain as his knowl- 
edge is profound. 

^See Englische StuJien,xxx\i, 1906, where this discovery of Profes- 
sor Wallace is most conveniently consulted. It was first communicated 
to The London Standard, October, 18, 1905. 



SHAKESPEARE AND PREVIOUS DRAMA 153 

Why Shakespeare went up to London is perfectly clear; ^ 
he was compelled to make a living for his family; a poaching 
expedition and threatened uncomfortable consequences may 
have hastened his departure. When he first arrived in the 
metropolis is not so certain. However it came about, Shake- 
speare was on the boards as an actor before 1590 and already 
done with his apprenticeship to the writing of plays. A year 
or two later he is one of the sharers or part owners in the most 
successful company of London. 

When Shakespeare took his place in the lead of his pro- 
fession he found the public prepared to welcome and appre- 
ciate theatrical entertainments by generations of familiarity 
with them; and he found, also, a secular drama already well 
advanced in a hardy vernacular growth, together with a stage 
which had passed beyond amateurishness into the beginnings 
of a recognized profession. Moreover, literature had all but 
shaken free of medievalism with its allegory and intent to 
instruct, to look at life steadily and yet to see that life, at 
need, in the transfiguring light of poetry. Shakespeare could 
have learned very little, except by way of warning, of Robert 
Wilson, who was active among the Earl of Leicester's players 
and the Queen's between 1574 and 1584; even although the 

■scenes of Antonio's negotiations with Shylock have been 
regarded as "anticipated" in Wilson's morality. The Three 
Ladies of London, printed in the latter year. Equally slight 
for the coming master of the stage must have been Shake- 
speare's contact with the famous clown of his time, Richard 
Tarlton, whose name has been attached by way of surmise to 
an older play on subject-matter afterwards treated by Shake- 
speare in his histories on Henry IV and Henry V. And yet 
it was precisely stuff such as this that the young Shakespeare 
was set to revise. However^ Shakespeare was not witfajnit , 

.examples worthy his young ambition, and in Lyiy and 

JMarlowe he found them. 

Of the precise chronology of Shakespeare's plays, as of 
those of most of his contemporaries, we are far from certain. 
Except for Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, which in 
revision falls beyond, the plays of Shakespeare's imitative 



154 SHAKESPEARE IN COMEDY 

period are either romantic comedies or dramas based on the 
history of English kings. We have touched sufficiently on 
Titus already for the purposes of this book. Let us turn 
first here to the earlier romantic comedies. Lovers Labor's 
Lost is usually assigned to the earliest place among the come- 
dies of Shakespeare (not later than 1591), and, although not 
published in quarto form until 1598 and then possibly re- 
vised, several features confirm this position. This comedy, 
w^ith all its originality, is pronouncedly Lylian in its person- 
ages, dialogue, and in type, in that it is, like Midas or Endimt- 
on, full of personal, political, and other satirical allusions. In 
this and in the peculiarity that it is the only plot of all 
Shakespeare's plays w^hich he appears frankly to have in- 
vented. Love's Labor 's Lost stands alone. Shakespeare's 
knowledge of the courtly society that he attempts to depict 
in this comedy can not be pronounced other than amateurish 
This is high life as seen from w^ithout; and the frequently 
trivial badinage of the three courtiers and ladies, so evenly 
arrayed each against each, the absurdities of Holofernes, Na- 
thaniel, and the rest, despite much promise, all serve to confirm 
this. Shakespeare never repeated this experiment in trans- 
planting the allusive and satirical court drama of Lyly to the 
common stage. But he soon tried another experiment, in 
The Comedy of Errors. Here he had the example of old Eng- 
lish plays such as Ralph Roister Doister and Gascoigne's 
Supposes; and it is impossible to credit him vv^ith ignorance 
of Plautus, whether he read the Mencechmi in some English 
version by William Warner or (if there are difficulties in this) 
in the original. The Comedy of Errors (written in 1591 if 
not even before), is a bustling and inventive farce of action. 
It redoubles the difficulties of the comedy of mistake, and 
produces as a result the most successful specimen of its class. 
It is worthy of note that among the many imitations of Roman 
comedy which Elizabethan drama affords, Shakespeare's 
Comedy of Errors should have outstripped all the efforts of the 
scholars. But Shakespeare never returned to Plautine comedy, 
though many comedies of the general type, mixed with that 
of disguise, followed him, developing in turn through the work 



"THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA" 155 

of Chapman and Jonson into a favorite variety of the comedy 
of manners. 

In his third extant experimental comedy, The Two Gentle- 
men of Verona (also first written about 1591), Shakespeare 
found a dramatic species to which he afterwards adhered. 
This was the romantic comedy of love and intrigue, based on 
ItaHan tales of the type made famous especially in Painter's 
Palace of Pleasure, 1 566. The plot of The Two Gentlemen 
of Verona is that of the story of the shepherdess, Felismena, 
in Montemayor's Spanish romance, Diana Enamorada, with 
the possible intervention of a lost play. As to the romantic 
drama in general type, it first manifested itself successfully, 
as we have seen, in the tragical works of Kyd and Marlowe 
or in dramas of heroical type like Greene's Orlando and 
Alphonsus, Vfhich hark back to Tamhurlaine. Save for trans- 
lations of Italian comedies such as Supposes by Gascoigne, 
1566, it is difficult to find examples of lighter Italian stories 
dramatized until we reach Shakespeare. Whetstone's Promos 
and Cassandra, 1578, fulfils the conditions of an English 
comedy modeled on an Italian tale, in this case a "novel" of 
Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi; but the plot is all but tragic and, 
though free at least from Seneca, is far removed from that 
lightsome and buoyant tone which we habitually associate 
with the term romantic comedy. Perhaps the only claim of 
Whetstone's coarse and verbose play is based on the fact that 
Shakespeare's genius subsequently transformed it into Measure 
for Measure. Mucedorus, a sprightly if elemental little comedy 
of romantic tone, was published first in 1595, and, despite 
some notion that Shakespeare may have had hand in it, is 
best assigned to the authorship of Thomas Lodge. But the 
source of Mucedorus is Sydney's Arcadia and, although the 
play is undoubtedly very early, it is questionable if it preceded 
The Two Gefitlemen of Verona on the stage. Returning then 
to this comedy, it becomes important in the history of the 
drama not only because in it Shakespeare first found his bent, 
but also because of its peculiar isolation as the first English 
comedy dealing romantically with love. As to the comedy 
itself, despite many faults, disclosing the continuance of the 



156 SHAKESPEARE IN COMEDY 

influence of Lyly, The Two Gentlemen of Verona gives promise 
in the decision and discrimination with which its principal 
figures are drawn — the faithful Valentine, the recreant 
Proteus, bright and generous Sylvia and steadfast, loving 
Julia — of the greater comedies to come. 

After these earliest comedies, Shakespeare applied 
himself to history and tragedy. Into neither need we follow 
him here; but rather look onward to the only two other come- 
dies that are accepted as early by universal consent. The 
Merchant of Venice was on the stage by 1594, and, in all 
likelihood^ modeled on an old play, mentioned by Gosson in 
1579, in which apparently both the story of the Jew and that 
of the "Lady of Belmont" were already combined. By the 
time that Shakespeare turned to the writing of this play, he 
had already deserted the guidance of Lyly for that of Marlowe, 
as will appear more fully in our discussion of the chronicle 
plays. The influence of Marlowe's Barabas on Shake- 
speare's Shylock has often been pointed out; and it is patent, 
whether in reminiscence of individual traits and passages or, 
as has been lately argued, in the very contrast of each poet's 
conception of the Jew.^ It is a mistake to suppose that the 
Jew was little known either to the literature of the time or by 
actual acquaintance with him in the London of Elizabeth. 
Aside from Gosson's mention, just alluded to, and the Gerun- 
tus of Wilson's Three Ladies of London, a just and honorable 
creditor, there was in actual life Roderigo Lopez, the queen's 
Jewish physician, the trial and execution of whom for alleged 
complicity in a plot against Elizabeth's life, early in 1504, ex- 
cited much popular interest. Whether it was this that led 
Shakespeare to his subtle study of Shylock, as has been held, 
or not, certain it is that that famous character is conceived in 
a full realization of the grotesqueness bordering on laughter 
and the pathos bordering on tears which characterizes his 
strange personality and situation. The admirable conduct 
of this play in the successful intermingling of comedy with 
a serious motive which rises for a moment almost to the height 

^Shakespeare's Jew and Marlowe's Christians, by William Poel, 
Wtstminster Review, 1 909. 



"A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM" 157 

of tragedy, its pervading humor and altogether dehghtful 
personages, attest that in The Merchant of Venice Shake- 
speare had reached, to the full, the manhood of his genius. 

A Midsummer-Night^s Dream is usually dated 1595 and 
is thought by some to have been written to celebrate a noble 
marriage, a purpose for which its grace and gaiety well fitted it. 
No source has been found for the major plot, though either 
The Knight's Tale of Chaucer or Plutarch's Life of Theseus 
may have served for the parts concerning that modified 
ancient hero. Here Shakespeare has made a poet's use of 
the supernatural, creating out of hints in popular folk-lore 
a new order of beings in the enchanting and dainty fairyland 
of Oberon and Titania. With its forest glades, peopled with 
bewildered lovers and fairy folk, the grotesque histrionic at- 
tempts of the "base mechanicals," and its pseudo-classic 
background of ancient Athens, Theseus and his amazonian 
bride, A Midsummer-Night'' s Dream marks the very acme of 
the difficult Renaissance art of agglomeration; for only the 
richest fancy, the most exquisite sense of the music of words, 
and the harmony between poetic expression and poetic thought 
could achieve such artistic unity in elements so repugnant. 

Turning back for the nonce to the beginnings of Shake- 
speare's conversancy with the stage, the chronicle play (which, 
it may be interjected, is a drama dealing in epic wise with 
subjects derived from the history of England) is the most 
striking of the several forms of literature which resulted from 
the realization of the national idea. Pride in England's 
present greatness, in the success of Elizabeth's fleet against 
the Armada of the King of Spain, and her skill in preserving 
her throne despite the fulminations of Rome, begot an enthu- 
siasm for the great deeds of Englishmen in the past such as 
had been unknown before. Of this literature in other forms 
an account has already been given in the first chapter of this 
book. It was inevitable both that the stage should share in this 
tide of patriotism and that the foremost writer for that stage 
should contribute most largely to the drama of this type. 
Shakespeare devoted literally a third of his dramatic activity 
to the writing of plays based on what was accepted at the time 



158 CHRONICLE HISTORY 

as English history, and he wrote many more such chronicle 
histories, as they were called, than any three of his competitors 
combined. In these historical dramas, too, better than else- 
where, can we discern the probable steps in his apprentice- 
ship to his art. 

Three plays on the events of the long but unhappy reign of 
King Henry VI are to be found in collective editions of Shake- 
speare. The first of these, we are told by Nash in an often 
quoted passage, achieved an unusual success in 1592, espe- 
cially on account of certain vivid scenes in which the hero, 
Talbot, figured in his warfare against the French; and it is 
likely that the other two parts followed closely in consequence. 
But if we examine these three plays, we find that all show clear 
marks of revision and rewriting, and an earlier version of the 
second and the third parts of Henry VI, differing materially 
from Shakespeare's, is extant. These two old plays may be 
called by a shortening of their cumbrous titles the first and 
second parts of The Contention between the Two Noble 
Houses of Tork and Lancaster, or shorter still, i and 2 Con- 
tention. Part first of Henry VI seems to indicate revision 
chiefly in the interpolation of individual scenes; while the 
other two (2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI), by a comparison 
with their earlier versions (i and 2 Contention), show rewriting 
line for line, in which, however, a large proportion of the 
original lines are retained intact. Some have held that, in 
these revisions, Shakespeare was only making over his own 
earlier work. But none of this work was claimed by him or 
published in his lifetime as his. Inasmuch, moreover, as 
Shakespeare was charged by Greene .with plagiarism and a 
passage was parodied in proof from one of these very plays, 
it is better to believe that, in the three parts oi King Henry VI, 
Shakespeare was refashioning the earlier material of others 
or at least work in which he had only shared with older fellow 
playwrights. The internecine feuds of the Wars of the Roses, 
detailed so minutely in this trilogy, seem deficient to us in 
interest as we read them to-day. To the Elizabethans the 
theme was an absorbing one, for it was thence that the stable 
Tudor monarchy under which they lived had been evolved. 



GREENE AND SHAKESPEARE 159 

As to the quality of these first ventures of Shakespeare into 
history, their promise is clear. Of a mere youth who could 
so revise the inchoate material of his predecessors almost 
anything might be predicted. 

But no account of Shakespeare can be complete without 
a reference at this point to the notorious attack upon him of 
Robert Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit purchased with a 
Million of Repentance, published late in 1592. This death- 
bed pamphlet of poor Greene has been quoted already in a 
passage describing the status of the contemporary actor. In 
an address to "His Quondam Acquaintance," in which he in- 
cludes Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge, Greene bids them beware 
of "these puppets [the actors] that speak from our mouths" 
and of "antics garnished in our colors." And he continues: 

There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that in 
his Tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide supposes he is as well able 
to bumbast out a blank-verse as the best of you; and being an abso- 
lute Johannes factotum is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene 
in a country .... Never more acquaint [those apes] with your ad- 
mired inventions, for it is pity men of such rare wit should be subject 
to the pleasures of such rude grooms. 

These allusions are clear to him who runs. The "Tiger's 
heart wrapt in a player's hide" is a parody on "Oh tiger's 
heart wrapt in a woman's hide," applied by the Duke of York 
to Queen Margaret, the "she-wolf of France," in the third 
part o{ Henry VI, and contained in that part of the play which 
Shakespeare took over from the 2 Contention. That Greene's 
rancorous opinion was not the prevalent one among Shake- 
speare's fellows in his profession, is proved by the ample 
apology which Chettle made soon after, in his Kind-Heart's 
Dream, for his part in the publication of Greene's unhappy 
tract. 

To return to the chronicle play, Shakespeare soon followed 
up his success with a more independent effort, the condensa- 
tion of two anonymous old chronicle plays, called The Trouble- 
some Reign of King John, by rewriting into one effective 
tragedy. This must have been early in 1593. Shakespeare's 



i6o CHRONICLE HISTORY 

King John marks a decided advance, and this notwithstand- 
ing much fidelity to an original which is far from worthy of 
contempt. It is in such personages as Falconbridge, Hubert, 
the little prince, and the two wrangling queens that we find 
the distinctness of characterization, the mingling of humor 
and pathos that came later so much more fully to distinguish 
our greatest dramatic poet. And in the dastard John appears, 
too, suggestion of a deeper study of character. But Shake- 
speare was not content to stop here. He turned from revision 
to imitation, recognizing, as who could avoid it, the masterly 
passion of Marlowe and filled with ambition to emulate his 
triumphs. Richard III, which must soon have followed King 
John, in 1593, is Shakespeare's one thoroughly Marlowesque 
tragedy. And this is patent alike in the heroic proportions 
of the distorted hero, monster that he is of conscious wicked- 
ness and crafty design, and in the lyric quality of the emotion 
which pervades many scenes. Richard III must have been 
to Shakespeare a tour de force much like the earlier Titus. 
Both are splendid followings of another man's gait and manner. 
Indeed, if we would realize to the full Vv^hat Shakespeare could 
do with a popular historical portrait, his Richard Crookback 
should be compared with the older True Tragedy of Richard 
III, to which gross if strongly written play he owed very little. 
Marlowe's Edward II must have been written within a 
twelvemonth of the date of his death in May, 1593. Whether 
Shakespeare's Richard III preceded Marlowe's play or not, 
it may be taken as almost certain that Richard II was planned 
in direct and daring emulation of Marlowe's successful tragedy. 
The subject-matter of these two later plays is as nearly identical 
as English history can afford; for in each a monarch who is 
unworthy to rule is thrown, in the contrast of circumstances, 
against a group of rebellious barons, and in each his prob- 
lematic character with his pitiful fall holds the center of the 
stage. But in Richard II, though he chose Marlowe's theme, 
Shakespeare enfranchised himself from Marlowe's method. 
It seems almost as if Shakespeare had determined to rival 
Marlowe on his own ground but in a manner of Shakespeare's 
own choosing. The conception of the wayward poetical- 



MARLOWE AND SHAKESPEARE i6i 

minded king, a poseur in fortune as well as in mischance, the 
contrast of his levity with the sagacity, unimaginativeness, and 
political effectiveness of Bolingbroke, the grasp and knowledge 
of the world which this tragedy presumes, and the sure touch 
and poetry with which it is written and embellished — all of 
these things place Richard II not only far above King John 
and Richard III but disclose Shakespeare as the triumphant 
rival of the now dead Marlowe, even though it be confessed 
that the closing scene of the latter's Edward remained, in its 
terror and pathos, as yet unequaled by the younger dramatist. 

In dramas such as these of Shakespeare and of Marlowe 
the tragedy of a man at odds with fate transcended the acci- 
dental circumstance that the protagonist was an English 
sovereign. But the average type, that in which history was 
staged epically and continuously, remained high in the popular 
esteem. Not to go too far afield here in the mention of what 
can be no more than mere names in a work of this scope, Peele's 
inferior Edward I, 1590-1591, had been of this type; and so 
was He3rwood's Edward IV, 1 594, .a play of no inconsiderable 
merit and dramatic excellence; Munday and Chettle's Robin 
Hood, Earl of Huntington, 1598, and several like productions. 
So that when Shakespeare put forth, in 1597, the first part of 
■his Henry IF, with its history diversified by the humors of a 
group of irregular humorists, headed by immortal Falstafl!^, 
he was only returning to the epic type of the chronicle play 
which from the very first had admittted the element of comedy. 
The popularity of Henry IF, with its story of the wild life of 
Prince Hal, the contrasted heroic Hotspur and witty, godless 
FalstafF and his rout, took the town by storm, and a second 
part was almost immediately demanded. To this Shake- 
speare responded in 2 Henry IF, and the following year wit- 
nessed the conclusion of the trilogy in Henry F, England's 
ideal king in action in triumphant warfare with England's 
hereditary enemy, France. 

In these three dramas we have the height to which the 
English chronicle play attained. Shakespeare made as much 
of the undramatic elements of continuous history as was pos- 
sible and he covered their inherent want of cohesion with his 



i62 CHRONICLE HISTORY 

consummate art of portraiture, character thrown into con- 
trast, and with the incessant play of his incomparable humor. 
The picture of the hero king, Henry V, when all has been said, 
is one of the most remarkable in Shakespeare. For it is the 
practical, unimaginative man of action, a conformist at heart 
despite his youthful escapades, who may be conceived to be 
the most difficult for the imaginative and poetical mind to 
appreciate and sympathetically reproduce. But Shakespeare 
himself was a confident and sagacious man of affairs; and 
there are no limits to the catholicity of his sympathies and 
affections. Shakespeare is as present in the stern and in- 
evitable repudiation of FalstafF by the regenerate young king 
as he is in his revels and those of his pals, royal and common, 
at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. 

FalstafF is more frequently mentioned in contemporary 
allusion than any other character of Shakespeare; and the 
first part of Henry IV (with Richard III, for other reasons) 
reached a larger number of editions within the period of 
Shakespeare's lifetime than any other one of his plays. This 
popularity led also to imitation. Four poets in the employ 
of Henslowe — Munday, Drayton, Wilson the younger and 
Hathway — set to work on a hurry order to write a rival play 
and produced two plays on the life of Sir John Oldcastle, under 
which name Shakespeare seems at first to have figured Sir 
John FalstafF. Only one of these plays remains extant and 
it is far from deficient either in humor or dramatic spirit; 
although, it must be confessed, that the thievish hedge-priest, 
Sir John of Wrotham, is a petty and futile attempt to rival the 
unparalleled wit of FalstaflF. A tradition relates that, delighted 
with these plays oi Henry IV, Queen Elizabeth expressed a 
wish to see FalstafF depicted in love and that the Merry Wives 
of Windsor, 1 598, was Shakespeare's reply. Clever and 
diverting comedy that it is, it is also notable as the only one of 
Shakespeare's frankly to accept an English scene. The buf- 
feted and defeated Falstaff of the Merry Wives is but a shadow 
in silhouette in comparison with the robust lover of Doll 
Tearsheet in 2 Henry IV. 

Although Henry VIII is a chronicle play, consideration 



OBITUARY PLAYS 163 

of it may be deferred for the present because of its , affiliations, 
by reason of Fletcher's hand in it, with the later plays of 
Shakespeare. Of the chronicle play in general it may be 
sufficient to say that it flourished in great variety of. 
nation with other dramatic elements especially throughout the 
last ten years of Elizabeth's reign. In tragedy it begot such 
productions as Thomas of Woodstock, 1591, an exceedingly 
able anonymous play on events in the reign of Richard II 
which preceded Shakespeare's tragedy of that sovereign; it 
mingled with drama of domestic type in Heywood's Edward 
IV, with comedy of disguise in Look About Tou, 1594, and the 
Robin Hood plays of Munday and Chettle; and continued in 
the dramatic biographies of lesser historical personages such 
as Sir Thomas Moore, Cromwell, Stukeley (ranging from 1590 
to 1596), and many more. On the death of the queen a series 
of obituary plays were staged, detailing the principal events 
of her life, directly as in Heywood's If Tou Knoiu Me Not Tou 
Know Nobody; allegorically in Dekker's Whore of Babylon; or 
■ dealing with the history of her immediate predecessors, as in 
Sir Thomas Wyatt, the scene of which is laid in the reign of 
Queen Mary; or in Rowley's When Tou See Me Tou Know 
Me, which describes events in the reign of Henry VIII. It is 
best to place Shakespeare's play on this monarch in this group, 
which falls within the first three years of James, whatever may 
have been its subsequent history. 

Still another variation from the usual type of the chronicle 
play was that which dealt chronicle wise with the legendary 
history of England. Among Elizabethan annalists and 
writers of plays little distinction was drawn between the deeds 
of Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, Macbeth, and Henry 
V; for all were fish to the historical drag-nets of the time. 
Gorboduc and Jocasta first levied on material of the mythical 
historical type, although inspired primarily by Seneca. Peele 
apparently was the first to transfer this species of tragedy to 
the popular stage in Locrine, 1586, and the older King Leir, 
staged about 1594, and perhaps by Lodge, is another ex- 
ample. The Birth of Merlin, 1597, by William Rowley and 
several Hke productions soon followed. It was this type of 



i64 CHRONICLE HISTORY 

drama in its tragic form that Shakespeare soon glorified in 
Macbeth and King Lear. The final absorption of the chron- 
icle play was romantic and in this, too, Shakespeare shared in 
such a play as Cymheline, the scene of which is legendary 
ancient Britain, although its interest is purely romantic. 

In 1598 Francis Meres included in his Palladis Tamia, 
"A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the 
Greek, Latin and Italian Poets," recognizing Shakespeare 
therein as the greatest dramatist and poet of his day and de- 
claring him "most excellent in both kinds [that is, comedy and 
tragedy] for the stage." His sonnets, as yet unpublished, his 
narrative poems, and twelve plays are mentioned by name; 
and the list includes all the plays named in this chapter except 
one, Henry V, which had not yet been staged. Meres further 
names a comedy under title o( Love's Labor's Won. Some have 
thought this a lost play, others have identified it with Much 
Ado About Nothing or with All 's Well that Ends Well. If (as 
still others have surmised), it was an earlier name for the Tam- 
ing of the Shrew, that play, also, may have been among the 
experiments of Shakespeare in comedy, though its known 
derivation from two earlier plays. The Taming of a Shrew 
and Gascoigne's Supposes, leaves it not improbable that Shake- 
speare, whatever the period of his work, was only the reviser. 

Six comedies of Shakespeare remain above those already 
mentioned to attest the height of his dramatic genius in this 
kind of play within the remaining years of Elizabeth's reign. 
Of these Much Ado About Nothing is usually supposed to have 
been staged soon after the appearance in print of Meres' 
*' comparative discourse." The story of Hero and Claudio 
was derived by Shakespeare from a novel of Bandello, though 
probably not without the intervention of an English play. 
The delightful courtship of Beatrice and Benedick seems an 
amplification of the relations of Rosaline and Biron in Love's 
Labor 's Lost, and in its sheer comedy affords a happy contrast 
to the somber elements of the major plot of Don John's machi- 
nations. Dogberry and Verges, though their originals might 
well have kept the peace in any hamlet in England, were dis- 
cernible in all their unmitigated absurdity only by the eye of 



"AS YOU LIKE IT" 165 

their creator. Lightsome and joyous As Tou Like It, on the 
stage by 1599, is an interesting example of Shakespeare's 
fortunate use of material near at hand. As a rule and es- 
pecially in his earlier period, the great dramatist preferred the 
rewriting of a play to any other process. Some twenty of his 
plays are almost certainly so derived from former dramas, 
English or foreign. In As Tou Like It, Shakespeare's im- 
mediate source was the pleasing pastoral romance of Lodge, 
known as Rosalynd or Euphues' Golden Legacy. In turning 
Lodge's story into a play Shakespeare amended its Euphuistic 
manner, which was now a fashion of the past; and while he 
retained some of the pastoral spirit, he added to it the freshness 
that pervades the English conception of an out-door life of 
outlawry contained in the ballads of Robin Hood, and sub- 
mitted the whole to much delicate raillery. The characters, 
too, as we compare them with Lodge's originals, are more 
subtly conceived and cast in a finer mold. Their motives are 
more elevated and they themselves far less conventionally 
pastoral. There is no more delightful love-making than that 
of Orlando and his Rosalind, and when we recall that the mel- 
ancholy Jaques, Touchstone with all his quips, his Audrey, 
and other characters are Shakespeare's additions to the tale, 
we can see how he could better admirable material and make 
out of a pleasing tale a comedy of unmatchable wit, wisdom, 
and lyrical beauty. 

Twelfth Night or What Tou Will, 1 60 1, offers a tempting 
problem to the seekers after sources in which no less than five 
plays, Italian, Latin, and German, and three stories are in- 
volved. Although a good prima facie case has been made out 
for Shakespeare's acquaintance with a Latin comedy called 
Lcslia, he doubtless found his chief material in the story of 
Apolonius and Silla, in Barnahe Riche, his Farewell to the Mil- 
itary Profession, and Malvolio's pretended madness may have 
been suggested in another story of the same volume. Once 
more, if we compare Shakespeare with his sources, we find how 
immeasurably he has refined his personages and the motives 
that guide their actions, how he has condensed, leaving out 
the irrelevant and repetitious, to create a whole group of char- 



i66 LATER COMEDIES 

acters — Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Feste, 
most fascinating of his clowns — and give coherence to one of 
the most delectable of his comedies. 

What event happened in the life of Shakespeare to produce 
the revulsion from all that was bright and joyous as depicted 
in the comedies just enumerated to the more serious themes 
ofJll 's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure and the 
gloom and misanthropy of Troilus and Cressida we can never 
know. Perhaps the sonnets — which with the last-named 
play are equally of the literature of disenchantment — paral- 
leled these weightier dramatic works. Perhaps these were no 
more than the passing moods that may beget in the musical 
composer, for example, the composition of a scherzo or rhap- 
sody on one day, and on the next a requiem. All 'j Well That 
Ends Well is commonly dated about 1602, although evidence 
has been found in the text to indicate that the comedy, as we 
have it, is the revision of earlier work, perhaps the play named 
by Meres in 1598 as Love's Labor 's Won. The story of Helena, 
the physician's daughter, her cure of the king of France and 
her pursuit and winning in the end of her recreant husband, all 
is to be found in The Palace of Pleasure, borrowed thence from 
Bandello. But the Countess of Roussilon, most engaging 
picture of elderly womanhood, Lafeu the steward, and the 
cowardly boaster, Parolles, all are of Shakespeare's invention, 
as is the difficult handling of the character of the heroine in a 
situation little calculated under ordinary circumstances to in- 
spire our admiration and consent. It has been held that Bert- 
ram's base associates, his hesitation, and plain lying in the 
denouement (which is Shakespeare's entirely), come "peri- 
lously near overshooting the mark" in the effort to enlist our 
sympathies on the side of Helena; and the play has been more 
seriously impugned for the coarseness and the daring of Hel- 
ena's device to trick her husband into her arms. But granting 
all this, Shakespeare's power over character and plot had not 
failed him in All 'x Well. Similarly, Measure for Measure has 
been submitted to criticism on the score of its coarseness of 
detail in certain scenes and for its frank and unhesitating treat- 
ment of a subject which modern daintiness affects to ignore. 



"TROILUS AND CRESSIDA" 167 

Measure for Measure contains passages which seem to place 
its staging after the accession of James in 1603. If we are to 
judge this powerful and unpleasant play of Shakespeare just- 
ly, we must recognize how he has humanized the repellant 
qualities of Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, his original 
in the tempted Puritan, Angelo, in peerless and immaculate 
Isabella, and her weak and erring brother, Claudio. 

Among the many problems that the plays of Shakespeare 
raise, few are more nearly insoluble than those involved in the 
strange but in no wise inferior "comedy" of Troilus and Cres- 
sida. The work was registered in 1603, printed in quarto 
with two different title-pages but identical texts in 1609, and 
reprinted in the folio with many detailed differences. There 
are parts of Troilus and Cressida which seem the work of an- 
other hand, yet there are passages unmistakably Shakespeare's 
at his best. The tone of the play is not only unheroic but dis- 
tinctly bitter and satirical at times; and it has been thought 
by some that in Troilus and Cressida we have Shakespeare's 
contribution to the war of the theaters, of which we shall hear 
more in the next chapter, and that the gross figure of Ajax is 
Shakespeare's attack on Ben Jonson. The story of Troilus 
and the faithless Cressida was a favorite subject not only in the 
Middle Ages (as Chaucer alone is sufficient to witness), but in 
the drama preceding Shakespeare. The dramatist may well 
have caught the spirit that converts the Trojan heroes into 
medieval knights, shivering lances for fair ladies, and the satir- 
ical tone in his treatment of antiquity from some one of the 
four or five plays on this subject, his predecessors, or from 
Greene's Euphues his Censure to Philautus, as has been sur- 
mised. Certain it is that vividly conceived as are Shakespeare's 
Cressida and Pandarus, bearing comparison with their originals 
in Chaucer, heroic as is Troilus, subtle and worldly wise as is 
Ulysses, the effect of this drama is disheartening, for here alone 
within the range of Shakespeare's dramatic activity do we feel 
that his faith in man has forsaken him and he has substituted 
for the nonce doubt, suspicion, and misanthropy for the larger 
traits of mind and heart that are prevailingly his. 

Thus as the reign of the old queen was drawing to its close, 



i68 LATER COMEDIES 

we find Shakespeare established in a worldly prosperity and 
success in his art that drew the eyes of envy and admiration 
upon him. His thrift extended not only to personal invest- 
ments in tithes and the purchase for his age of the»best house 
in Stratford; it extended to a prudent foresight as to the future 
of his company when Elizabeth's successor should come to the 
throne. There is a well-known topical allusion to the depart- 
ure of the young and popular Earl of Essex for Ireland in the 
prologue to the last act of Henry V; and a well-authenticated 
story tells of the acting, by men of Shakespeare's company, 
of Richard II before the conspirators at the time of the Essex 
rebellion, that their courage might be whetted and an example 
set them of the deposition of an English sovereign. Plainly 
Shakespeare looked foreward hopefully to the new reign to 
come. He did more. With his company in disgrace in 1601 
for these performances, he made a business alliance with one 
Laurence Fletcher, an actor who had already taken a troupe to 
Edinburgh and was known personally to King James; and 
the upshot of this alliance appeared in the circumstance that, 
on the accession of the king, the Chamberlain's men (Shake- 
speare's company), was the first to pass under the royal pat- 
ronage, becoming the King's players. 

But there are other things to contemplate in Shakespeare's 
rise within the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Without seeking as 
yet the heights of the greater tragedies, Shakespeare had trav- 
eled far from the trivialities of Love's Labor 's Lost to the con- 
summate comedy of Twelfth Night and As Tou Like It. 
Books have been written on this absorbing theme; and the 
development of Shakespeare's genius has been traced in his 
verse and his style, his rhetoric and his taste, and in the larger 
influences of his experience and contact v^^ith men. Clearly 
even Shakespeare must once have been an apprentice to his 
art; and quite as certainly he soon transcended all the tricks 
and rules of the playwright's trade. An attempt to trace the 
poetical growth of Marlowe is frustrated at once by the brevity 
of his meteoric career. On the other hand, Ben Jonson was 
too much the conscious artist, despite the length of his life, too 



GROWTH IN SHAKESPEARE 169 

much the constructive mechanician of his own artistic develop- 
ment, to make it possible for us to observe in him those pro- 
cesses in the unfolding of genius which in their orderliness and 
their inevitability are as capable of prognostication as the pro- 
cesses of nature, Shakespeare's career as a dramatist was of 
at least twenty years' continuance. His openness to impres- 
sions was that of a field long lain fallow; and, save for certain 
storms that beset all life, his calm and benignity was that of 
nature and of the wide heavens. It is here that we can 
look for natural growth, for development as obvious and 
rational as the unfolding of a flower. It is not only that Shake- 
speare was imaginatively and creatively the most richly en- 
dowed of mankind; he was happy in suffering fewer lets and 
hinderances in his development than most men. He did not 
see life through learned and classical spectacles like Jonson, 
nor through the kaleidoscopic lenses of Italian romance and 
allegory as did Spenser. He was not hampered, like Sidney, 
by the necessity of experimentation in literature; nor led on by 
"speculation to the overturning of the reasoning of a scholastic 
world like Bacon. It may be confidently affirmed that Shake- 
speare, better than most writers, yields to that analysis that 
discloses an orderly growth in all that goes to constitute the 
outward as well as the spiritual and inward qualities of 
genius. 

And when this analysis is made, we find, to summarize, 
first a versification trending gradually from a certain degree 
of regularity and rigidity to the freedom of a master of his 
craft in the employment of pauses, redundancy, suppression or 
substitution of syllables, whereby Shakespeare's blank-verse 
becomes a thoroughly plastic medium in his hands, adaptable, 
as English verse had never been before, to the thousand moods 
that constitute the demands of the drama. Secondly, as to 
Shakespeare's style, we find it characterized by affluence in 
diction and vocabulary, by a lavish, at times extravagant, use 
of what he has, and by spontaneity, absolute ease and readi- 
ness, and as absolute an unrestraint. Let us take two passages 
in conclusion of this matter, the first from A Midsummer- 



1 70 



LATER COMEDIES 



Night's Dream, the second (if we may look forward for the 
moment) from Cymheline. 

These are the forgeries of jealousy: 

And never, since the middle summer's spring, 

Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead. 

By paved fountain or by rushy brook. 

Or in the beached margent of the sea, 

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind 

But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport. 

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, 

As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea 

Contagious fogs; which, falling m the land, 

Have every petty river made so proud. 

That they have overborne their continents: 

The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain. 

The ploughman lost his sweat; and the green corn 

Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard: 

The fold stands empty in the drowned field. 

And crows are fatted with the murrain flock; 

The nine-men's morris is fill'd up with mud; 

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green. 

For lack of tread, are undistinguishable: 

The human mortals want their winter cheer; 

No night is now with hymn or carol blest: — 

Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, 

Pale in her anger, washes all the air. 

That rheumatic diseases do abound: 

And thorough this distemperature we see 

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts 

Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose; 

And on old Hiems* thin and icy crown 

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds 

Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer, 

The childing autumn, angry winter, change 

Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, 

By their increase, now knows not which is which: 

And this same progeny of evils comes 

From our debate, from our dissension; 

We are their parents and original. 



GROWTH IN SHAKESPEARE 171 

Away! — I do condemn mine ears that have 
So long attended thee. If thou wert honorable, 
Thou wouldst have told this tale for virtue, not 
For such an end thou seek'st, — as base as strange. 
Thou wrong'st a gentleman who is as far 
From thy report as thou from honor; and 
Solicit'st here a lady that disdains 
Thee and the devil alike. — What ho, Pisanio! 
The king, my father, shall be made acquainted 
Of thy assault: if he shall think it fit, 
A saucv stranger in his court, to mart 
As in a Romish stew, and to expound 
His beastly mind to us, — he hath a court 
He little cares for, and a daughter who 
He not respects at all. — What ho, Pisanio! 

In the former of these quotations it matters little that the em- 
broidery runs a Httle less or more amply. In Imogen's strong 
defiance of a treachery that only her innocence has made her 
dull to perceive, there is not a vv^ord too much. Shakespeare 
seldom errs with a display of luxuriance in these supreme 
dramatic moments; but full restraint, like much else, came, 
even with Shakespeare, after years and trial. 

Other things that mark the development of Shakespeare's 
genius concern his gradual improvement in taste, in dramatic 
technique, characterization, and in the attitude that he assumes 
towards the creatures of his brain. Shakespeare never en- 
tirely freed himself of the tyranny of the word. His age seems 
never to have wearied of puns, and verbal fence and quibble 
On the other hand and barring this, with time came power 
and grasp. And nowhere in our literature is there to be found 
a more marvelous display of the ductility, the subtle music, 
the significance and associative force of English words, than 
these plays disclose in their finer passages. 

This chapter has already exceeded its bounds. To an- 
other, that on the heyday of tragedy, must be deferred the 
further discussion of Shakespeare's development in the dra- 
matic technique and larger qualities of his art. 



CHAPTER X 

VERNACULAR DRAMA OF DEKKER, HEYWOOD, 
AND MIDDLETON 

AS compared with that of Elizabeth, few ages in the 
world's history have accepted with such unaffected 
faith at once the hard inevitability of facts and the enchanting 
possibilities of fortune. And in few times was life in the coarse 
fiber of its daily routine so shot with bright threads of romantic 
experience and adventure. It is related that the queen, who 
had ardently expressed to the Scottish ambassador, Melville, 
her wish that she might see and speak with her dear sister, 
Queen Mary, was taken with Melville's proposal that, dressed 
as a page, her majesty accompany his train to Scotland; and 
that she dallied with the idea for days. As to the stage, so 
peculiarly the mirror of the time, few sorts of Elizabethan 
thought and action were left unrepresented thereon; and that 
representation, as often as not, mingled with what was familiar 
and at hand, things rare and strange, recognizing that the 
separation of these two, the visible and the invisible, the 
actual and the ideal, is more a habit of thinking than it is 
ever a feature of life itself. 

It was this combination of a recognition of the actualities 
of life with a fine romantic spirit that raised the eclectic and 
somewhat slovenly art of Greene to a position of respect; 
and in Dekker, Greene's successor in certain forms of the 
drama as well as in the pamphlet, we find no dissimilar com- 
bination Of the life and extraction of Thomas Dekker 
little is known. He informs us in one of his pamphlets that 
he was born in London. Probably this was not far from 
1570. The form of his name and his evident famiharity with 
the Dutch language suggest that his family came originally 
from the Low Countries. Dekker first appears as a dramatist 
in 1598, though it is not unlikely that by that time he had 

172 



DEKKER'S "OLD FORTUNATUS" 173 

been for several years conversant v^^ith the stage. He con- 
tinued to v^rite plays, pamphlets, broadsides, anything, for 
forty years, and at one time prepared pageants for the city. 
Dekker's life was full of struggle and toil, he was much in 
prison for debt and received charity at the hands of Edward 
Alleyn, the actor. In the drama Dekker exhibits an art as 
mixed and varied as that of Greene himself. As to subject 
and general conduct, Dekker is governed almost completely 
by the taste and demands of the city, even though he rises 
occasionally into the regions of the truest poetry as in passages 
of Old Fortunatus. This comedy was on the stage by 1599. 
In plot it levies, as Faustus did before it, on the old romantic 
folk-lore of Germany; although Dekker also contrives to 
give to the whole that flavor of the English morality which we 
find so strong in Marlowe's tragedy. The story of Dekker's 
comedy deals with Fortunatus, an elderly native of Cyprus, 
who receives at the hands of the goddess of fortune the gift 
of an inexhaustible purse and steals from "the Soudan of 
Babylon" a cap which has the power to convey the wearer 
wherever he may desire. Fortunatus soon dies in his folly — 
for he has chosen wealth when he might have had better things 
— and the play proceeds to set forth the contrasted careers 
of his two sons, Ampedo, who is virtue, ignorant how practi- 
cally to employ Fortune, and Andelocia, who lavishes her gifts 
in self-indulgence and vice. The extant version of OU For- 
tunatus has been adapted for court. This explains why 
Dekker has so lavished on it his delicate fancy and a power 
of poetical expression that will compare favorably with the 
best of his fellows in the drama. Of several beautiful lyrics 
that this play contains, none is more musical than the song 
contrasting Vice with Virtue : 

Virtue's branches wither. Virtue pines, 

O pity, pity, and alack the time. 
Vice doth flourish, Vice in glory shines. 

Her gilded boughs above the cedar climb. 
Vice hath golden cheeks, O pity, pity, 

She in every land doth monarchize. 



174 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

Virtue Is exiled from every city, 

Virtue is a fool, Vice only wise. 
O pity, pity, Virtue weeping dies: 

Vice laughs to see her faint; — alack the time. 
This sinks; with painted wings the other flies: 

Alack that best should fall, and bad should climb. 

pity, pity, pity, mourn, not sing. 
Vice is a saint, Virtue an underling. 
Vice doth flourish, Vice in glory shines, 
Virtue's branches wither. Virtue pines. 

At the conclusion of the comedy, the palm of victory Is awarded 
to Virtue, vs^ho now turns to the queen with the words: 

All that they had or mortal men can have, 
Sends only but a shadow from the grave. 
Virtue alone still lives, and lives in you; 

1 am a counterfeit, you are the true; 
I am a shadow; at your feet I fall, 
Begging for these, and these, myself and all. 
All these that thus do kneel before your eyes 
Are shadows like myself; dread Nymph, it lies 
In you to make us substance. 

In The Shoemakers' Holiday, i6oo, we have, as typically 
as delightfully, the bourgeois spirit of Elizabethan London. 
The disguise of high-born Lacy as a shoemaker's apprentice 
to win the love of Rose who is only a lord mayor's daughter; 
the faithful wife, Jane, who foils her rich and persistent suitor 
in her faith in the return of her cobbler husband, Ralph, who 
has been impressed for the wars; above all, the humors of 
Simon Eyre among his journeymen and apprentices, prince as 
he is of shoemakers and good fellows, with his elevation to the 
mayoralty and the friendship of his king — such is the sub- 
ject-matter of this busy, delightful comedy, borrowed and 
bettered as it is from one of the prose tales of Thomas Deloney. 
The Shoemakers' Holiday is typical of one of the happiest 
groups of the comedy of contemporary life. Dekker presents 
the life about him frankly, merrily, and roundly, seeking neither 
the lesson of the moralist nor the distortion of him who scorns 
and satirizes. There were other Elizabethan examples of 



DOMESTIC DRAMAS 175 

this type of comedy, such as the anonymous Wily Beguiled, 
Henry Porter's lively Two Angry Women of Ahington, and 
William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money. Shakespeare's 
Merry Wives of Windsor, too, is of this type; and all were on 
the stage by 1598 and hence preceded Dekker's shoemakers. 
Another favorable specimen of lighter comedy is The Merry 
Devil of Edmonton, 1600, which has been ascribed to the 
authorship of Drayton and touches the supernatural in its 
introduction of the English Faustus, Peter Fabel. Indeed, 
should we seek for the roots of this sort of play, we should find 
them deep in morality times when the picturing of famihar 
everyday life on the stage rose into popularity as a means of 
enlivening the serious intent of the old drama to teach right 
living. 

Dekker was much given to the practice of collaboration 
and wrote plays with at least half a dozen other authors. 
Such a play was Patient Grissel, 1598, in which Chettle and 
Haughton both had a share with Dekker. This dramatizing 
of a medieval story of the slavishly devoted wife, long since 
told by Chaucer, brings Dekker into touch — as does the story 
of Jane for that matter in The Shoemakers' Holiday — with 
a long series of domestic dramas in which the virtues of the 
- faithful wife are set forth and extolled. This universal theme 
exhibits itself in almost every conceivable form in Elizabethan 
drama, in tragedy as well as comedy, in foreign as well as in 
English setting, now throwing into contrast the jealous or 
neglectful husband or exacting lover, and again placing beside 
the faithful wife the wanton or her less malignant contrast, 
the shrew. Between 1602 and 1607 some half-dozen dramas 
combine the subject of the faithful wife with that of the young 
spendthrift, for such How a Man May Choose a Good Wife 
from a Bad, by Joshua Cooke, the anonymous London Prodigal, 
Wilkins' Miseries of Enforced Marriage, and Marston's Dutch 
Courtizan, their very titles proclaim them. Of equally early 
origin in the drama are the lighter comedies of this class which 
throw into prominence the nature of the "shrew," beginning, 
as they do, with The Taming of a Shrew, before 1590, which 
Shakespeare revised in his Taming of the Shrew, later answered 



176 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

by Fletcher in The Woman s Prize or the Tamer Tamed^ 
which may date as early as 1606. This story of the taming of 
Petruchio by a second wife who followed poor Katherine, 
who had become too tame to live long, enjoyed great popularity 
in the reign of King Charles, when it was often acted on al- 
ternate nights with Shakespeare's comedy. In The Honest 
Whore, printed in two parts, 1604 and 1630, Dekker collaborat- 
ed with Middleton. Here the themes of the shrew and the 
submissive and virtuous wife are united in a new aspect into 
a serious drama which, save for one or two of Hejrwood's, rises 
well above the best of its class. Here is told the story of a 
fallen woman's regeneration by means of a passion inspired in 
her by one who takes her passing fancy but withstands her 
blandishments. And herein also is displayed in vivid realism 
her steadfastness in virtue when temptation returns to her at 
the hands of this very man, and she is compelled to endure 
want and ignominy for her refusal to return to a life of sin. 
The figure of Bellafront is admirably conceived and executed 
and remains, with that of Signor Frescobaldo her old father, 
who in disguise as her servant sustains her in her struggle 
to lead a virtuous life, the most effective and touching piece 
of character drawing in which Dekker had a hand. 

Quotation in patch and fragment is always unsatisfactory, 
but never more so than when it seeks to suggest the large lines 
of a finished picture. Frescobaldo has long disowned his dis- 
honored daughter and, assuming an air of hearty content, 
declares: "Though my head be like a leek, white, may not 
my heart be like the blade, green ?" He continues: 

May not old Frescobaldo, my Lord, be merry now, ha ? I have 
a little, have all things, have nothing: I have no wife, I have no 
child, have no chick, and why should not I be in my jocundare ? 

Hipolifo. Is your wife then departed ? 

Fresco. She's an old dweller in those high countries: yet not 
from me. Here, she 's here; a good couple are seldom parted. 

Hipolito. You had a daughter too, sir, had you not ? 

Fresco. Oh, my Lord! this old tree had one branch, and but 
one branch growing out of it: it was young, it was fair, it was straight: 
I pruned it daily, drest it carefully, kept it from the wind, helped it 



DOMESTIC DRAMAS 177 

to the sun; yet for all my skill in planting, it grew crooked, it bore 
crabs : I hewed it down. What 's become of it, I neither know nor 
care. 

Told that Bellafront is dead, he cries: 

Dead! My last and best peace go with her! I see Death 's a 
good trencherman; he can eat coarse, homely meat as well as the 
daintiest. Is she dead ? 

Hipolito. She *s turned to earth. 

Fresco. Would she were turned to heaven. Umh ! Is she dead ? 
I am glad the world has lost one of his idols .... In her grave 
sleep all my shame and her own: and all my sorrow and all her sin. 

Hipolito. I 'm glad you are wax, not marble. 

But later, undeceived and assured that Bellafront is not really 
dead, but poor, and her husband, v^ho had first betrayed her, 
in jail for the killing of a man, Frescobaldo breaks out once 
more against his daughter, declaring. 

I am sorry I wasted tears upon a harlot, .... I detest her, 
I defy both, she is not mine, she 's — 

Hipolito. Hear her but speak. 

Fresco. I love no mermaids. I '11 not be caught with aquail-pipe. 

Hipolito. You *re now beyond all reason. Is 't dotage to relieve 
your child, being poor .'' 

Fresco. 'T is foolery to relieve her. Were her cold limbs stretched 
out upon a bier, I would not sell this dirt under my nails to buy her 
an hour's breath nor give this hair, unless it were to choke her. 

Hipolito. Fare you well, for I '11 trouble you no more. 

Exit Hipolito. 

Fresco. And fare you well, sir. Go thy ways; we have few lords 
of thy making that love wenches for their honesty. 'Las, my girl, 
art thou poor ? Poverty dwells next door to despair; there 's but a 
wall between them. Despair is one of Hell's catchpoles; and lest 
that devil arrest her, I '11 to her. Yet she shall not know me. She 
shall drink of my wealth as beggars do of running water, freely, yet 
never know from what fountain's head it flows. Shall a silly bird 
pick her own breast to nourish her young ones: and can a father see 
his child starve ? That were hard, the pelican does it, and shall not I ? 

Turning from Dekker, whose other plays from their 
affiliations in authorship and subject may be best considered 
elsewhere, we find in Heywood even a closer representative in 



1 78 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

the drama of the ideals of the city and of its preference for 
homely and domestic subjects. Thomas Heywood came of 
Lincolnshire and was both younger and somewhat better 
born than Dekker. Heywood's birth was about 1575. He 
was sometime fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and, judged 
by his use of the classics, a good scholar. He became an actor 
about 1596, covenanting not to act for any other company 
save Henslowe's. He appears, however, both to have acted 
and written for several companies of players. Heywood was 
altogether the most fertile among the old dramatists, declar- 
ing himself that he was concerned, in whole or in part, with 
the composition of two hundred and twenty plays. Of these 
some thirty-five alone have survived; and their author in- 
terested himself as little as did Shakespeare in the preser- 
vation or publication of any of them. Like Dekker and 
Middleton after him, Heywood furnished pageants for the 
city; and he contributed largely in his later years to pamphlet 
literature. The two chronicle plays of HejAvood have already 
received the brief mention which their relative merits deserve. 
The bias of Heywood's dramatic art towards domestic drama 
is patent in both these plays, Edward IV turning chiefly on 
that sovereign's relations to Mistress Jane Shore and her 
unhappy story, // Tou Know Not Me, lugging in much bio- 
graphical matter concerning Sir Thomas Gresham and a 
somewhat apocryphal nephew of his to eke out the account, 
by way of obituary in 1604, of "the troubles of Queen Eliza- 
beth." It is likely that between these two chronicle histories 
and about 1596, Heywood made his strange adventure into 
classical story, dramatizing ancient mythology as he found it in 
Ovid, the Iliad, and elsewhere. The novelty of this departure 
was justified by its success; for The Goldefi, Silver, Brazen and 
Iron Ages, as the published titles ran, comprise no less than 
five plays of disjointed and heterogeneous material, astonish- 
ingly well done when the conditions are considered. Another 
early venture of Heywood's links on to the heroical dramas 
such as Greene's Orlando Furioso, Charlemagne, and The 
Thracian Wonder. But here, as in the histories, the taste of 



"A WOMAN KILLED WITH KINDNESS" 179 

the London citizen and his credulity as to romantic marvels 
ruled to produce, in The Four Prentices of London, a pre- 
posterous combination of knightly adventure with a glorifica- 
tion of civic pride. It w^as the absurdities of these London 
"prentices," sons to "the old Earl of Bulloigne," and the 
impossible adventures by means of which each carved out for 
himself a kingdom, that Beaumont later ridiculed in his 
noteworthy dramatic burlesque, The Knight of the Burning 
Pestle, 1607. But the citizens preferred their Prentices, and 
Beaumont's clever satire remained to be appreciated by a 
later and a more sophisticated generation. 

However, the strength of Heywood lay not in these experi- 
ments. He contributed an admirable play to the series which 
contrasts the faithful wife with the prodigal son in The Wise 
Woman of Hogs Jon, doubtless acted about 1604. And if he 
is the author of The Fair Maid of the Exchange, he added, in 
the valiant cripple of Fenchurch, a new and interesting figure 
to the drama. A Woman Killed with Kindness, first published 
in 1607, is Heywood's most distinctive work. In it two 
situations of ordinary domestic life are interwoven into a plot 
less straggling and careless than is usual with this author. I 
can not find these situations so improbable and contrary to 
experience as some of late have found them. A sister's 
honor offered in barter for the satisfaction of a supposed debt 
of honor incurred to an enemy, the seduction by an ingrate of 
his benefactor's wife, a woman of seeming sense and virtue, 
surely such are not situations of "naive unreality." This last, 
indeed, with its attendant plight of an honorable man, wronged 
by the woman he continues to love but with feelings chastened 
by the offense which he abhors, is Hejrwood's favorite situ- 
ation. It is the story of Jane Shore, her honorable husband, 
and the king in Edward IV; of Frankford, his wife, and her 
betrayer in A Woman Killed with Kindness; and of Wini- 
fred, Young Geraldine, and his faithless friend in The Eng- 
lish Traveler, a play of later date. In the supreme scene of 
A Woman Killed with Kindness, when, having suffered her 
paramour to escape, Frankford, the wronged husband, con- 



i8o VERNACULAR DRAMA 

fronts his guilty wife who has fallen groveling at his feet, we 

have the following dialogue : 

Mistress Frankford. Oh, by what word,what title, or what name, 
Shall I entreat your pardon ? Pardon! oh! 
I am as far from hoping such sweet grace 
As Lucifer from heaven. To call you husband — 

me, most wretched! I have lost that name, 

1 am no more your wife. 

Frankford. Spare thou thy tears, for I will weep for thee: 
And keep thy countenance, for I '11 blush for thee. 
Now I protest, I think 't is I am tainted. 
For I am most ashamed; and 't is more hard 
For me to look upon thy guilty face. 
Than on the sun's clear brow. What would'st thou speak 1 

Mist. Frank. I would I had no tongue, no ears, no eyes, 
No apprehension, no capacity. 
When do you spurn me like a dog ? when tread me 
Under your feet ? when drag me by the hair ? 
Though I deserve a thousand thousand fold 
More than you can inflict: yet, once my husband, 
For womanhood, to which I am a shame. 
Though once an ornament — even for his sake 
That hath redeemed our souls, mark not my face, 
Nor hack me with your sword; but let me go 
Perfect and undeformed to my tomb. 

Frank. My God, with patience arm me! Rise, nay, rise, 

ONan! O Nan! 

If neither fear of shame, regard of honor. 
The blemish of my house, nor my dear love 
Could have withheld thee from so lewd a fact. 
Yet for these infants, these young harmless souls. 
On whose white brows thy shame is charactered, 
And grows in greatness as they wax in years, — 
Look but on them, and melt away in tears. 
Away with them! lest, as her spotted body 
Hath stained their names with stripe of bastardy. 
So her adulterous breath may blast their spirits 
With her infectious thoughts. Away with them. 

Mist. Frank. In this one life I die ten thousand deaths. 



LESSER PLAYS OF HEYWOOD 



I8l 



And the scene ends with the husband's solemnly declared 
decision to banish his wife from his sight and that of their 
children forever, and to leave her, with every creature comfort 
about her, absolutely an exile from his life and love. 

Such was not the usual fate, we may feel sure, of culprits 
like Mistress Frankford, who sufficiently declares her expecta- 
tion of the customary brutal justice of the time. Heywood 
was a novel moralist for his age and preached — shall we call 
them without offense — the bourgeois virtues of charity, 
restraint, and self-control, alive to the superior quality of 
human pathos over mere terror and revenge. It is this directr 
ness, honesty, and the homely pathos that Heywood employs 
in the treatment of situations, such as these that caused that 
rare critic of our old drama, Charles Lamb, to dub him with 
no extravagance of phrase, a "prose Shakespeare," and to 
remark on his utter carelessness as to the preservation or 
publicity of his plays: "Posterity is bound to take care that 
a writer lose nothing by such a noble modesty." In his later 
and lesser plays: in The Fair Maid of the West, 1603, breezy 
comedy of adventure that it is; in Fortune by Land and Sea, 
1607, which he wrote with Rowley; in the intrigue, classically 
derived, o£The Captives (of doubtful date); even in the later 
Challenge for Beauty and Royal King and Loyal Subject, in- 
fluenced as both of these last were by the new romantic senti- 
mentality of Fletcher, we find ever recurring in Heywood's 
plays a charming unaffectedness of manner and a pathos that 
is born only of a true humanity of heart. Heywood long sur- 
vived most of his fellow-dramatists, dying, it is believed, as 
late as 1648. 

In estimating the value of literary work such as that of 
Dekker and Heyw^ood, whatever the demands of absolute 
criticism, we can not but take into consideration the conditions 
under which much of that work was done. The little we know 
of Dekker spells improvidence and its consequent privation 
and suffering. The bookseller, Kirkman, relates of Hey- 
wood that he wrote something every day, filling at times the 
backs of tavern bills or other chance scraps of paper with 
his notes and scribblings: a sufficient glimpse into the Bohe- 



i82 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

mianism of that playwright's surroundings. Both Heywood 
and Dekker lived for years in a kind of bondage (shared by 
many of their fellows) to Philip Henslowe, pawnbroker, man- 
ager, and exploiter of the theater; for, whatever the lack of 
specific proofs, there seems little reason to make out that a 
vulgar, illiterate man, who grew rich on the labor that kept 
others in beggary, was really a beneficent friend to actors 
and playwrights and an enlightened encourager of the drama. 
Fortunately for the modern historian of the drama, Henslowe 
kept a species of general memorandum and account book in 
v^hich he recorded day by day his dealings with plays and play- 
w^rights. This work is known as Henslowe's Diary. It is 
still preserved in Dulwich College which was founded by Ed- 
ward AUeyn, the actor, Henslowe's son-in-law, with money 
inherited at least in part from Henslowe. Henslowe's Diary 
has been published more than once and of late carefully edited 
and annotated,^ so that we have, now easily at hand, much in- 
formation as to the theatrical -business of Elizabeth's day, at 
least so far as it was conducted by the most successful and 
aggressive of the rivals of Shakespeare. 

Henslowe's Diary, the entries of which lie between 1592 
and 1614, contains references by name to nearly every popular 
dramatist of his immediate time; and the signatures of a num- 
ber of them appear subscribed to agreements, obligations, and 
other papers. Neither Shakespeare's name, nor Beaumont's, 
nor Fletcher's, appears in Henslowe; for the obvious reason, 
his dealings were not with them. But aside from Dekker and 
Heywood, the lesser names of Munday, Chettle, Haughton, 
Hathway, Drayton, Wilson, and others of the popular school 
recur again and again in his pages, attached not only to plays 
which remain to disclose the nature of the wares in which 
Henslowe dealt, but to many more which time has happily 
suffered to perish. Other men, some of them among the 
greatest in later times, began in apprenticeship to Henslowe 
and worked out into a larger field and a greater independence. 
Such were Middleton, Chapman, Marston, Webster, and Jon- 
son, each one of whom devised, wrote, and mended plays for 

^ See the ed. by W. W. Greg, 1 904-1 908. 



"HENSLOWE'S DIARY" 183 

Henslowe, received advances in earnest for his promises, 
accepted obligations, and was bailed by him, on occasion, out 
of the debtors' prison. In the Diary may be found memoranda 
of Henslowe's returns from the several theaters — the Rose, 
the Sw^an, the Fortune and the playhouse at Nev^ington — in 
which he was at various times interested; his expenditures for 
various companies — the Earl of Sussex's, Lord Strange's, 
the Queen's, and the Admiral's men; his loans to playwrights 
and agreements with actors, advances of money to property 
makers and costumers; and a large number of letters, more 
or less concerned with dramatic affairs. From these pages we 
learn that a new play cost Henslowe from six to eight pounds 
sterling, and that the price of plays more than doubled before 
the end of his life in 1616. With due allowance for the differ- 
ence in the purchasing value of money, it is difficult to ima- 
gine how the dramatic v/riters of the day contrived to make 
even a modest living out of their vocation. This alone is 
enough to explain why they so frequently turned to acting, to 
pamphleteering, to pageant making, and such patronage as 
might be secured; and this is why the only men who acquired 
a competence out of their traffic with the stage were Alleyn, 
Burbage, and Shakespeare, each one of whom was a manager 
as well as an actor. Before we leave Henslowe's Diary one 
caution is necessary to the unwary. The picture which this 
book of accounts discloses is less an example of what we may 
assume to have been likewise the conditions of Shakespeare's 
authorship than a contrast of those conditions. Henslowe 
was a shrewd man of business who built theaters where and 
when they were v\^anted, catered to the taste of the moment, 
and exploited art and, in exploiting it, degraded it as his kind 
always does. The management of Shakespeare's company 
is not to be conceived as in everyway ideal. Shakespeare and 
Burbage, too, were men of business; but each v/as possessed of 
the artist's temperament which admits the existence of ideals 
even if it does not always follow, much less attain them. 
Happily Shakespeare's age, with all Its materialism, retained 
the Renaissance recognition and worship of art, and hence with 
his three or four companies and a score of poets, with readi- 



1 84 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

ness to do anything in art or in business that might be con- 
ceived of as popularly demanded, Henslowe battled for years 
in vain for leadership over the Chamberlain's men who em- 
ployed, besides Shakespeare, not more than two or three other 
poets, and enjoyed some eighty per cent of the patronage of 
the court. 

A long and forbidding group of domestic dramas are those 
most simply denominated the murder plays. They deal, 
for the most part, with actual tragedies frequently of recent 
occurrence, and may be regarded as among the productions of 
our old drama that performed one of the most popular func- 
tions of the modern newspaper. A larger proportion of plays 
of this class than of some others have perished and there is no 
need here to chronicle their forgotten titles. The first murder 
play in point of time that remains extant is Arden of Fevers ham; 
and it is, by universal consent, conceded to be the finest 
example of its type. Arden was in print by 1592, and has 
by some been dated back to a time prior to the Armada. The 
story is that of the sordid murder, after several abortive 
attempts, of Arden by his unfaithful wife, Alice, and her 
paramour, a base serving-man named Mosbie. The source 
in Holinshed is followed with close fidelity, and little attempt 
is made to order the material artfully, much less to ennoble 
the subject by flights of poetry or depths of moralizing. The 
force of the tragedy lies in its simple and vivid realism, in the 
unrelenting faithfulness with which the unknown author has 
contrived to produce an artistic efi^ect by representing the 
blind infatuation of Arden's wife for a worthless, menial 
coward, and the weakness and fatalism of the husband's 
own nature, until inevitable tragedy overtakes all. In its 
robust and vigorous kind, it is not possible to find the equal 
among English plays of Arden of Feversham; and this excel- 
lence has led to the opinion — held by no less an authority than 
the late Mr. Swinburne — that we have in this tragedy early 
dramatic work of Shakespeare's. "Ease and restraint of 
style," a mastery of humor and irony, and a depth of insight 
into character and motive, these are some of the qualities in- 
dubitably possessed by the author of Arden of Feversham, 



THE MURDER PLAYS 185 

And all of these are Shakespeare's, if we judge him at large 
and especially in his later work. But Shakespeare was no 
such master of these maturer qualities of his art in 1590; and 
it is difficult to conceive of the unrestrained and poetical pen 
that wrote Romeo and Juliet, the early comedies, and Titus 
Andronicus as capable of disclosing simultaneously the con- 
trolled, if coarser, art of Arden of Feversham. Whoever the 
author of this remarkable play, the suggestion of an indigenous 
tragedy of everyday life, raised to a grade of artistic success 
and permanence less by the graces of poetry than by the force 
of uncompromising realism, was not realized in subsequent 
dramas of the type. 

Among minor murder plays may be named A Warning 
for Fair Women, 1598, "containing the most tragical and 
lamentable murder of Master George Sanders of London, 
nigh Shooter's Hill, consented unto by his wife," and Two 
Tragedies in One, 1 599, in which the contemporary killing 
of one Beech, a chandler in Thames Street, is detailed with a 
crude and rigid respect for the letter. A more important 
murder play is the one-act Yorkshire Tragedy, 1605, wherein 
the story of a young and well-born murderer, named Calverley, 
was placed on the boards while the matter was as yet fresh in 
the memories of the auditors, and in a kind of continuance of 
Wilkins' Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 1 605, a domestic 
play already mentioned. The "Shakespearean manner" 
discovered by some in this brief dramatic sketch is due doubt- 
less to a more or less successful imitation of the superficialities 
of the master's style rather than to any closer contact with him. 
It is fair, however, to add that The Yorkshire Tragedy was 
acted by the King's company. But Shakespeare was not 
its only poet. The later scattering murder plays of this 
bourgeois type fall beyond the period with which this book is 
concerned. 

In the comedies that have thus far been described in this 
chapter and in the more serious plays, to a certain extent as 
well, the attitude of the author has been that of the simple 
chronicler of what he sees before him, except for the tinge of 
romance that enters into productions like The Four Prentices 



1 86 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

of London, Old Fortunatus, or The Merry Devil of Edmonton. 
This in general is the attitude of Heywood, and of Dekker 
in his eadier works. There is, however, another and very- 
different aspect in which life may be presented successfuly 
on the stage, and that is the satirical. In this method of 
presentation the thing seen is not nearly so important as the 
effect to be produced on the beholder; the essentials of Hfe 
hold no such place as its conventions and accidental super- 
ficialities. In a word, with the advent of satire the drama 
becomes conscious Sometimes the satirical dramatist is a 
moralist as we shall find in Jonson. At others, as in Middle- 
ton, he stops short of any intention to teach or improve, con- 
tent with the mere transcript of life in its comic, contradictory, 
and scandalous departures from custom and convention. 

Thomas Middleton was born in 1570 and received his 
education at Cambridge and Gray's Inn. His work, despite 
much coarseness, discloses a better bred man than either 
Dekker or Hejrwood; but his career differs little from theirs 
in the variety of his contributions to the drama, to civic 
pageantry, and to pamphleteering. The earliest plays of 
Middleton were written in conjunction with Munday, Dekker, 
or Webster in the workhouse of Henslowe, and they comprise 
refashionings of older plays of the chronicle type, such as 
The Mayor of Queenborough, 1597, and an Entertainment to 
King James, which he wrote with Dekker in 1604. Middle- 
ton later frequently collaborated with William Rowley, and 
some excellent work was the result. For the present we 
are concerned with Middleton's comedies of London life and 
manners which he wrote, for the most part, between 1604 and 
16 14. These begin in Michaelmas Term (which equals the 
modern phrase, London in the season, though it deals with a 
different grade of life), and extend through J Trick to Catch 
the Old One, A Mad World my Masters, Tour Five Gallants 
to A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and No Wit no Help Like 
a Woman s. These titles are themselves descriptive of the 
subject-matter of these comedies and this enumeration by 
no means exhausts the list. In Middleton's comedies recur 
again and again the young spendthrift, going the pace, eternal 



COMEDIES OF MIDDLETON 187 

darling of those that delight in the theater; the usurious 
money-lender whom we laugh to see hoist with his own petard; 
uncles and fathers duped, trusting maids deceived but ever 
faithful; braggarts beaten; fools despoiled and abused; and 
wit forever triumphant. Middleton's intention, in a word, 
was the presentation on the stage of a witty and satirical picture 
of contemporary London life. He avoided any attempt at 
romance, such as Greene and Dekker were prone to, and he 
escaped the moralist's attitude of Jonson as well. Middleton's 
search was not for the charm of the unusual, and he had no 
uncommon insight into common things; nor did he, on the 
other hand, paint his world to show how wicked it was. His 
words might have been: "This is the London of my day; 
come, let us laugh about it"; and, having amused you with 
the truth as he saw it, he has done all. In the accomplish- 
ment of this result Middleton employed not only a discerning 
eye and a wide if superficial experience in life, but the con- 
structive arts of a consummate dramatist and a ready, fluent 
style, in all respects adequate to his purpose. Middleton is 
the truest of realists, but he is commonly disappointing; not 
that we expect poetry here — it belongs little to his subjects 
— but that there is a worldliness about him, a willingness to 
extenuate moral turpitude and explain away moral upright- 
ness that, however it be justified by human experience at 
times, is displeasing in art. 

This careless, witty, conscienceless, satirical comedy 
became the most prevalent of its time and was imitated by 
several of Middleton's contemporaries, whose ideas of life 
were sounder than his own. Thus Dekker in collaboration 
with John Webster (later to make so great a name in romantic 
tragedy) wrote, between 1603 and 1606, two plays. Westward 
Hoe and Northward Hoe, that mark the very depths of the 
gross and vicious realism to which the comedy of the day oc- 
casionally descended: and lesser imitations, among which 
Lodowick Barrey's one comedy. Ram Alley, 1609, and Na- 
thaniel Field's Woman is a Weathercock and Amends for Ladies, 
both 161 1, are the best, followed in quick succession. Even 
when plays were not wholly given up to this mode of comedy, 



1 88 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

when the romantic ruled or their scene was translated ta 
outlandish countries, an under plot or episode frequently- 
maintained the favorite satirical picture of contemporary man- 
ners which no veil of Italian lawn nor Spanish domino could 
entirely disguise. 

When all has been said, however, the greatest of the disci- 
ples of Middleton in the comedy of manners was John Fletcher, 
a dramatist destined to outstrip him in the multiplicity of his 
gifts, and this notwithstanding the fact that there is a greater 
Middleton than the Middleton of the comedy of manners. 
The best of Fletcher's comedies of London life, to which we 
shall return later in this book, only glorify, by means of a 
somewhat finer perception of its possibilities, the kind of 
drama that Middleton had rendered by his talents popular on 
the stage. 

But, as already suggested, Middleton's dramatic activity 
was not confined to comedies of manners. The earliest play 
with which his name has been associated. The Mayor of Queen- 
borough, 1597, is a chronicle history converted into a romantic 
drama; and The Old Law, 1599, ^ capital farce on what in 
our contemporary phrase we denominate "Oslerism"; Blurt, 
Master Constable, 1601, and The Phanix, both have a like 
romantic cast. William Rowley, with whom Middleton was 
associated in many plays, was an actor as well as a playwright. 
Rowley was likewise the author of several pamphlets of the 
type made popular by Greene and Dekker, among which A 
Search for Money, 1609, descriptive of the low life of the city, 
is typical. In 1607 we find Rowley in collaboration with 
Day and Wilkins in the composition of a formless production 
for the stage called The Travails of Three English Brothers; 
and it is not unlikely that Rowley's unaided effort, A Shoe- 
maker a Gentleman, followed within two or three years. This 
vigorous comedy is, like The Four Prentices of Heywood, a 
direct appeal to the bourgeois prejudices of the citizens of 
London; for therein is told of the apprenticeship of a Roman 
prince, Crispianus, to a London shoemaker and of much else, 
familiar as well as heroic and strange. At what time Rowley 
rewrote an earlier play, Uter Pendragon, into The Birth of 



"A FAIR QUARREL" 189 

Merlin, first published in 1662 as "by Shakespeare and Row- 
ley," it would be difficult to say. This play, like The Shoemaker, 
is far from devoid of merit, and though coarse to an extreme 
in parts, is characterized by a certain honesty of purpose and 
command of boisterous humor that give Rowley his place. 
Rowley's greatest drama, the tragedy All 's Lost by Lust, 
belongs to a period beyond the limits of this book. His 
association as a collaborator with Middleton began about 
1614 by the temporary union of the companies for which each 
had been previously writing and continued until the death 
of Middleton in 1627. The most noteworthy products of 
this joint authorship. The Spanish Gipsy and The Changeling 
(by all odds the greatest play in which Middleton had a hand), 
also fall beyond us. But in the very year of the death of 
Shakespeare these two playwrights produced A Fair Quarrel, 
raising and disposing of an interesting question in an age of 
dueling: dare a man fight in a quarrel unless he believes that 
he defends the truth ? The Elizabethan age had its problems 
as we have ours. The Honest Whore, A Woman Killed with 
Kindness, A Fair Quarrel, are problem plays in the Elizabethan 
sense. This last is a fine serious drama of its class and de- 
serves, in its virile directness, the praise that is evoked from 
Charles Lamb in contrast to "the inspid levelling morality" 
to which the modern stage of Lamb's time, if not of ours, was 
tied. "A Puritanical obtuseness of sentiment," continues the 
critic, "a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us 
instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and 
blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those 
noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the 
quarrels, the animosities of man, a beauty and truth of moral 
feeling, no less than in the iterately inculcated duties of for- 
giveness and atonement. . , . To know the boundaries of 
honor, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance which 
shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to 
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is 
to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cow- 
ardice when that ark of an honest confidence is found to be 
frail and tottering, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace 



190 VERNACULAR DRAMA 

blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed 
false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately: 
to do, or to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something 
more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of percep- 
tion in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing 
of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honor 
as opposed to the laws of the land, or a commonplace against 
duelling." The main plot of ^ Fair Quarrel is alone enough 
to atone for all the moral lapses of Middleton's comedies of 
manners. To what degree the ruder but more generous nature 
of Rowley was responsible for the success of this excellent 
drama we need not here inquire. 

Any further pursuit of the comedy of manners would lead 
us either into a wider consideration of Fletcher or into a con- 
trast with the Jonsonian comedy of humors. Both topics 
will be best treated below. In the vernacular domestic drama 
discussed in this chapter, whether it display itself in the direct 
realism of Dekker, the homely pathos of Heywood, or the 
flippant actualism of Middleton, we may realize better than in 
the contemplation of the drama in its higher types how truly 
of the people the Elizabethan dramatists were. This is not 
where the poetry and the ideality of Elizabethan literature 
reside, but where a vigorous part of its truth is to be found: 
and art ceases to be art alike when tethered hand and foot to 
the actualities of the mundane world or when those bonds are 
wholly burst to leave it a disemfeodied ghost at the mercy of 
every unbeliever's incredulity. 



CHAPTER XI 

LATER ANTHOLOGIES AND LYRICS TO BE 
SET TO MUSIC 

The miscellany made up of the work of several authors 
continued to be the accepted mode of publishing lyrical verse; 
and in most cases the fiction at least of reluctance on the part 
of the author to appear in print v^as sedulously maintained. 
Brittons Bower of Delight, 1591, was a pirated collection, trad- 
ing on the well-known name of Nicholas Breton and including 
other work besides his own. The Phoenix' Nest, edited in 1593 
by one"R. S. of the Inner Temple," whose identity Is unre- 
coverable, contains much of the best poetry of Lodge as well 
as more of Breton; and The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, is made 
up of poetry piratically culled from still more recent poets 
who were attracting the public eye. It is in this last anthology 
that Marlowe's "Come live with me" was first printed, be- 
sides two important sonnets of Shakespeare. And it v/as in 
The Passionate Pilgrim that several fine poems of Richard 
Barnfield (chief among them "As it fell upon a day") were 
attributed to Shakespeare, to cling to his name, despite proof 
to the contrary, and be often reprinted as his. England's 
Helicon, the richest of Elizabethan miscellanies, was published 
by John Bodenham, a general collector and editor, in 1600. 
The poetry that it gathered belonged to a somewhat earlier 
period than that of publication, so that it really precedes The 
Passionate Pilgrim as to the authors that it represents. Spen- 
ser, Sidney, Constable, Breton, Lodge, and Peele are the 
familiar names most frequently recurring in England's Helicon; 
and there is still about its many graceful Italianate poems not 
a little aflFectation of shepherds and shepherdesses. We may 
omit here more than a mention of certain irregular collec- 
tions such as the several poems on the theme of "The Phoenix 
and the Turtle," including work by Shakespeare, Jonson, 

191 



192 LATER ANTHOLOGIES 

Marston, and Chapman, affixed to that somewhat mysterious 
publication known as Chester's Love's Martyr, 1601; and mere 
gatherings of extracts Hke Belvedere (later called The Garden 
of the Muses) and England's Parnassus, both 1600. And it is 
unnecessary for us to be misled into confusing the fanciful 
titles which individual poets gave at times to their works — 
Munday's Banquet of Dainty Conceits or Breton's Arhor of 
Amorous Devices — with the titles of true anthologies. 

The last important miscellany of lyrical verse in Elizabeth's 
reign is Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, published in iboa.. 
Francis Davison was the eldest son of William Davison, Eliza- 
beth's unfortunate privy councilor and secretary of state whom 
she disgraced for carrying her warrant for the execution of 
Mary Stuart to the Council. Francis was educated at Gray's 
Inn, where a masque of his was performed in 1594. Davison 
and his father were adherents of the Earl of Essex, like South- 
ampton, Shakespeare's patron, and so many hopeful younger 
spirits of the time; and the young poet lost all chance of pre- 
ferment in consequence. Francis made little of the law, and 
in 1602 turned his attention to publishing the poetry he had 
written and collected. There is no trace of him after 1608, 
when the will of his father was probated. He is supposed, 
however, to have lived until about 1618. As to his Rhapsody^ 
it contains, besides his own poetry (which is distinguished for 
its erotic fervor and directness), that of his two brothers, some 
of Sir John Davies, of Donne, Sylvester, translator of Du 
Bartas, of Sir Henry Wotton, Thomas Campion, and much 
anonymous verse. The Poetical Rhapsody is full of sonnets 
and madrigals and represents poetry, mostly written at least 
a dozen years later than that contained in England's Helicon. 
A dozen years meant much in this age of peculiar literary 
quickening. Altogether this collection most fittingly opens 
a new period. 

We have already traced in brief the history of the Eliza- 
bethan lyric and found it flourishing successively in pastoral 
form and in the sonnet. We have seen how general was the 
lyrical gift, how varied the nature of the poetry of this type, 
and how it was governed, in the main, by that sensuous delight 



ELIZABETHAN MUSIC 193 

in the beauty of the visible world that is the distinctive artistic 
note of the Renaissance. Upon the v^avering of the sonnet 
fashion the attention of lyrists w^as directed chiefly to the writ- 
ing of songs to be set to music. To these as they occur first 
in the song-books of the time and secondly in the dramas we 
now turn. 

The early skill and prominence of the English in music 
has long been recognized. Indeed, the earliest period of 
modern music, that extending from 1400 to the uprise of 
Italian music with Palestrina in the latter half of the sixteenth 
century, has been designated by historians of music as the 
English period. Within this time the Flemings alone could 
hold their own with English musicians and composers, and 
it was not until Italian influence on literature had reached full 
flood that the corresponding influence in the sister art became 
at all important. From early times, too, in England the 
essential unity of poetry and song had received recognition. 
The poet and the musician frequently united in the same per- 
son, as in the case of King Henry VIII, to descend to no meaner 
example. Moreover, not only were poems of a distinctly 
lyrical nature habitually set to music, but narrative verses and 
ballads, often of considerable length, were actually sung. As 
to some of his lyrical Posies, Gascoigne remarks on the margin, 
"these have very sweet notes adapted unto them, the which 
I would you should enjoy as well as myself." Robert South- 
well, the Jesuit father, proposed that his fervid religious 
poetry be sung; and so late as 1622, Patrick Hannay, a very 
obscure poetling, furnished the music for the first stanza of 
his poem, Philomela, with the unabashed intent that the re- 
maining ninety or more stanzas be sung to the same tune. 

The cultivation of music in the reign of Queen Elizabeth 
was universal. To play neither the lute nor the cithern, to 
prove unequal, whether young man or woman, to bearing your 
part at sight singing or to "running a discant," as the freer 
song was called, was to raise question of your nurture and 
gentle training. The very carters and tinkers caroled at their 
trades; and the weavers became proverbial for the excellence 
of their singing. Elizabeth prided herself on her technical 



^ 



194 



LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 



skill on the virginal, and was regaled when she dined in state 
with kettle-drum and trumpets. The establishment of the 
royal chapel was a considerable one, no less than sixty voices 
being at times maintained therein at the royal expense. The 
queen is said to have expended more than a thousand pounds 
a year in the maintenance of the royal music; and positions, 
such as those that we have already seen men like Edwards and 
Hunnis occupying, were of dignity and of no small emolument. 
The Elizabethan musician was a man of very special training. 
Even a mere lutenist was often a university-bred man, and 
no one could pretend to posts of importance in connection with 
the queen's service, sacred or secular, who was not a doctor 
of music of Oxford or Cambridge. The modern musician 
who lives only by his dexterity of voice or skill on some one 
instrument appears to have been little known to the time. 
Where known at all, he was placed in the category of masters 
of fencing or dancing. By the term musician, in the reign of 
Elizabeth, a creative artist and composer was understood. 

The Elizabethan song-book commonly supplied both music 
and words, and was printed either in separate parts of alto, 
basso, and so forth, or these parts were so arranged on the page 
that three or four singers might sit on opposite sides of a table 
and sing each his own part. The sacred song-book was of 
course made up of hymns; the secular, usually of madrigals 
and airs. These terms had very definite meanings which we 
have lost in modern times. By a madrigal, in music, was 
meant a polyphonic piece for several voices without accom- 
paniment; while an air was acccompanied and, whether written 
for one voice or for several, was not in counterpoint. As a 
form of poetry, the Elizabethan madrigal is a poem of lyrical 
or epigrammatic nature, integral like the sonnet, that is, not 
composed of a succession of like stanzas. The madrigal, 
metrically, is often made up of a system of tercets, followed 
by a couplet or more; but none of these features are constant. 
In length the madrigal ranges from half a dozen verses to 
sixteen or even occasionally more; and the meter varies for 
the most part independently of the rimes, and in verses of 
differing lengths, most commonly lines of five and of three 



THE MADRIGAL 195 

stresses. Lastly, a preference is shown for feminine or double 
rimes over single ones, a trait derived from the madrigal's 
Italian original and referable to the English attempt to repro- 
duce syllable for syllable for the meter's sake. A perfect little 
madrigal in nearly all the conditions of the species as well as: 
in grace and in epigrammatic point is this, entitled "In Praise 
of Two," from Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, the author un- 
known. 

Faustina hath the fairer face, 

And Phyllida the feater grace; 
Both have mine eye enriched: 

This sings full sweetly with her voice; 

Her fingers make as sweet a noise: 
Both have mine ear bewitched. 

Ah me! sith Fates have so provided,. 

My heart, alas, must be divided. 

It is not to be supposed that composers, with the sudden 
•popularity of madrigal singing, held with any degree of strict- 
ness in this matter of words, to any such rules as these of their 
Italian originals. The Hne between a short poem of nearly 
any meter and a madrigal was soon obliterated, and the quat- 
rain and couplet asserted themselves (as in the sonnet) as 
the arrangements of rime peculiarly English. A responsible 
collection of English Madrigals in the Time of Shakespeare ^ 
discloses that the musicians of the age set everything to the 
fashionable part song: pastorals and experiments in foreign 
versification by Sidney, songs of Jonson's masques and of 
Shakespeare's plays, an occasional sonnet of lighter sentiment, 
and even several stanzas of The Faery Queen. 

As to the introduction of the madrigal into England, it is 
related that the Earl of Arundel, visiting Italy in 1568, "em- 
ployed Tarviso, an Italian musician, to compose a set for him. 
The word "madrigal," however, seems not to have been em- 
ployed until the first song-book of the ty^e.,Musa Transalpina, 
collected by Nicholas Yonge, a London merchant, trading to 
Italy and enthusiastically fond of music. Musa Transalpina 
was published by William Byrd in 1588. In his preface 

*By F. A. Cox, 1899; see pp. 13, 14. 



196 LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 

Yonge writes: "I endeavored to get into my hands all such 
English songs as were praiseworthy, and amongst others I had 
the hap to find in the hands of some of my good friends certain 
Italian madrigals translated most of them five years ago by 
a gentleman for his private delight." Two years later Thomas 
Watson, the lyrist, published The First Set of Italian Madrigals 
*' Englished not to the sense of the original ditty, but after the 
affection of the note." This statement of the title should dis- 
pose of the notion that Watson, who showed himself expert 
enough in Italian elsewhere, was ignorant or careless of his 
sources. He was after words that would set to the music 
whether sung in English or in the original. It is of interest to 
note that Watson's book was strictly contemporary, drawing 
on but four collections of Italian madrigals, none of them dat- 
ing earlier than 1580. 

From this point onward song-book after song-book issued 
from the press. A list of books of this kind, appearing be- 
tween the time of the Armada and 1630, contains no less than 
ninety items, and discloses an equal number of composers. 
Sixty-six of these publications appeared between 1595 and 1615; 
and fifty, between 1600 and the year of Shakespeare's death. 
Hence the inference that the vogue of the song followed that 
of the sonnet, as the sonnet had followed the pastoral mode in 
popular estimation. 

In turning to a consideration of those who were responsible 
for these song-books, we find, as a rule, only the names of the 
writers of the music given; at times it may be suspected that 
the name on the title-page is little more than that of the pub- 
lisher or collector. For example, William Byrd, described as 
*'the central musical figure of the Elizabethan age, celebrated 
early and living late," enjoyed for some years the monopoly 
of music publishing which he sold later or shared with Thomas 
Est and Thomas Morley. Byrd was certainly no more than 
the publisher of Musa Transalpina; but he was likewise a 
composer of note, as his Psalms, Sonnets and Songs, 1 588, 
Songs of Sundry Natures, 1 589, and several other collections 
attest. Once more, we have seen how the madrigal writers 
in their search for words set anything that they could lay theii 



ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 197 

hands on to music. But when the song-books are examined, 
they disclose, nevertheless, a large proportion of lyrics, in- 
capable of identification in the works of known poets, a matter 
that gives rise to the question how far the composers of the 
day may have been their own poets. On this point Mr. 
Bullen (who of all can best speak for the Elizabethan lyric) is 
of opinion that "as a rule composers are responsible only for 
the music"; while Mr. Davey, author of an excellent History 
of Music, says: "It appears to me that, as a rule, the poems 
and the music were simultaneously conceived; I ground this 
belief on the detailed parallelism in the matter of the successive 
stanzas in the airs through which the same music fits them 
all." A better argument might be founded on the uniformity 
of poetical style which at times accompanies the musical work 
of the same composer. Although, as to this, it has been 
affirmed that all the words of Morley's First Book of Ballets, 
1595, are from the pen of Michael Drayton. In the works of 
the greatest man of this class, Thomas Campion, at least, we 
are certain that the two arts were fittingly and indissolubly 
wedded. And for this we may cite his own words "to the 
reader" prefixed to his Third Book of Airs: "In these English 
airs I have chiefly aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly 
together; which will be much for him to do that hath not 
power over both." 

Among the several musicians who may thus not impro- 
perly be entitled to a place in the choir of Elizabethan lyrists, 
may be named John Wilbye, author of two sets of Madrigals 
in 1598 and 1609, and famed as "the greatest of English mad- 
rigalian composers"; Thomas Morley, the prolific author of 
no less than seven like works between his Canzonets of 1593 
and his First Book of Airs, 1600; and John Dowland, the 
celebrated lutenist, author of four books of Airs before 1601. 
On the other hand these musicians often set the poetry of others 
to music. Thus Morley's First Book contains the original 
setting of Shakespeare's "It was a lover and his lass. And 
the songs which Richard Johnson composed for The Tempest 
are published in Cheerful Airs and Ballads, 1 660. The memory 
of Dowland, likewise, has been associated with Shakespeare 



198 LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 

because of the fine sonnet, "In praise of music and sweet 
poetry," attributed by Jaggard, a piratical publisher, to the 
great dramatist and commonly republished since as his, though 
it is really Barnfield's. Dowland carried the fame of English 
musicians to the continent and was for years lutenist to the 
king of Denmark and to other great people abroad. 

Other names of madrigalists there are: Orlando Gibbons, 
organist of Canterbury Cathedral; Philip Rossiter, associated 
with Campion and not without a place in the history of the 
drama; Thomas Weelkes, of whom we know little; Robert 
Jones, of whom we know nothing. Of Tobias Hume, we are 
only certain that he was a captain. The quality of the poetry in 
the song-books of these men occasionally reaches rare heights 
and lyric perfection. More commonly it rises little above the 
general level of the Elizabethan lyric. Take this one perfect 
stanza from Tobias Hume's First Part of Airs, French, Polish 
and Others Together, 1605, which Mr. Bullen picked out for 
the text, so to speak, of one of his collections of lyrics : 

love! they wrong thee much 
That say thy sweet is bitter. 

When thy rich fruit is such 

As nothing can be sweeter; 
Fair house of joy and bliss, 
Where truest pleasure is, 

I do adore thee: 

1 know thee what thou art, 
I serve thee with my heart. 

And fall before thee. 

Quite as perfect for the music of their words are lines such as 
these: from The Muses' Garden of Delights^ collected in 1601 
by Robert Jones : 

The sea hath many thousand sands. 

The sun hath motes as many. 
The sky is full of stars, and love 

As full of woe as any: 
Believe me that do know the elf 
And make no trial for thyself; 



THOMAS CAMPION 199 

or these lines, half whimsical yet deeply serious, from the same 
choice collection: 

How many new years have grown old 
Since first thy servant old was new! 
How many long hours have I told 

Since first my love was vowed to you! 
And yet, alas! she doth not know 
Whether her servant love or no. 

But when all has been said, in Thomas Campion we reach 
the prince of this tuneful realm of Elizabethan song. That 
so delightful a minor poet should have needed rediscovery 
towards the end of the nineteenth century is a matter all but 
inexplicable, for Campion's reputation was commensurate 
with his talents in his own age. The date of his birth is un- 
certain. He was educated at Cambridge and Gray's Inn, 
and published Latin Epigrams as early as 1594. His song- 
books were printed between the years 1601 and 1619. In 1602 
appeared his Observations in the Art of English Poesy, in which 
he attacked "the vulgar and inartistic custom of riming" and 
attempted to prove that English metrical composition was 
faulty in not following the classics. Campion was ably an- 
swered in the next year by Daniel, who expressed his wonder 
that such an attack should proceed from one whose "com- 
mendable rimes, albeit now himself an enemy to rime, have 
given to the world the best notice of his worth." Later in life 
Campion became a distinguished practitioner of medicine, 
and held, as well, an honorable place among contemporary 
musicians, alike for his compositions and for his excellent 
treatise, A New Way to Make Four Parts in Counterpoint, 
published in 1613. Although a conservative in theory as to 
versification. Campion was remarkably liberal as to music 
and wrote airs in preference to madrigals of set purpose. He 
says : "What epigrams are in poetry, the same are airs in music; 
then in their chief perfection when they are short and well 
seasoned." 

The inspiration of Campion is more directly classical than 
that of almost any lyrist of his immediate time. Campion's 
limpidity of diction, his choice placing and selection of words, 



200 LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 

his perfect taste and melody, and his devotion to love, all are 
qualities v^^hich disclose how steeped he was in the poetry of 
Tibullus and Catullus. Unlike most of his fellow lyrists, 
Campion was practically uninfluenced by the contemporary 
poetry of Italy and France; at least his name appears not in 
the black lists of pilferers and plagiarists from these literatures 
in which our contemporary doctors' theses so revel and delight. 
But Campion's originality is not entirely confined to his aptness 
of expression. He keeps constantly before him his idea of the 
epigrammatic quality of such verse as he regards fit to set to 
airs. Take for example the following: 

Thou art not fair, for all thy red and white. 

For all those rosy ornaments in thee; 
Thou art not sweet, though made of mere delight, 

Nor fair nor sweet, unless thou pity me. 
I will not sooth thy fancies: thou shalt prove 
That beauty is no beauty without love. 

Yet love not me, nor seek thou to allure 

My thoughts with beauty, were it more divine. 

Thy smiles and kisses I can not endure, 

I '11 not be wrapt up in those arms of thine: 

Now show it, if thou be a woman right, — 

Embrace, and kiss, and love me in despite. 

The turn here at the end almost equals that of the much praised 
sonnet of Drayton, "Since there's no help." Another dis- 
tinguishing quality of Campion is the ease and ductility, so to 
speak, of his verse. What he does, he does so readily that it 
hardly seems difficult. 

Come, cheerful day, part of my life to me: 

For while thou view'st me with thy fading light, 

Part of my life doth still depart with thee. 
And I still onward haste to my last night. 

Time's fatal wings forever forward fly: 

So every day we live a day we die. 

Here not a word is inverted, unusual or turned to the slightest 
figurative use, and yet the eff^ect is perfect of its kind. Cam- 
pion, as this stanza suggests, was not quite wholly an amorist. 



SONGS OF THE DRAMA 201 

Among his poems will be found no inconsiderable number 
possessed by a simple and quiet religious fervor; for the fash- 
ion of the song-book, like that of the sonnet and other lyrical 
poetry, included divine as w^ell as secular themes. 

That the drama should have contained songs is as natural 
as that the drama should have contained comedy; and the 
origin of song and comedy is in the English drama referable 
to much the same conditions, chief among them a desire to 
amuse. If we turn back as far as the moralities and interludes 
we shall find the few snatches of song, there indicated, com- 
monly put into the mouth of the roisterer, the vice, or the devil; 
though godly songs are not altogether wanting. The earliest 
regular comedies are full of songs : there are some half-dozen 
in Ralph Roister Doister, which the excellent old school-master, 
Nicholas Udall, never found in his master Piautus; all are 
sprightly, though of little value from a literary point of view. 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, the other "earliest comedy," con- 
tains one famous bacchanal song, "Back and side go bare, go 
bare," which alone is enough to immortalize that rude old 
play. For genuine spirit and for the vividness of the medieval 
tavern scene which it suggests, this song deserves a place be- 
side "The Jolly Beggars" of Burns. In the tragedies and the 
earlier histories there was little opportunity for the introduction 
of songs; though there is at least one in Peele's David and 
Bethsahe of merit. Marlowe has none in his plays, and Greene 
lavished his lyrical gift upon his pamphlets. So far as we 
know, the earliest English dramatist of note to appreciate to 
the full the value of the incidental lyric in the drama and to 
raise that species of song-writing to an art was John Lyly. 
Epigrammatic though the songs of the Euphuist are, they de- 
serve an honorable place in the poetry of their time; though 
we may share in the late Mr. Henley's doubt if such poetry be 
lyrical. Recall Lyly's best known song, "Cupid and my 
Campaspe played at cards for kisses," and we can see how 
artificial and witty this art of epigram really is. Then read 
one of the few exquisite lyrics of Thomas Dekker, nearly all 
of them contributed to plays, and we recognize the difference. 
If asked to name one lyric and one only which should illustrate 



202 LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 

to the full the music, the sincerity, and the spontaneity of Eliz- 
abethan poetry, I should choose neither the profound depth 
of a Shakespearean sonnet nor the pastoral sweetness of Breton 
or Greene, the haughty insolent vein of Raleigh nor the su- 
premely original and at times contorted thought of Donne; 
but Dekker's dainty lyrical sigh on " Sweet Content " 

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers ? 

O sweet content! 
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplexed ? 

O punishment! 
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vexed 
To add to golden numbers, golden numbers ? 
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content! 
Work apace, apace, apace, apace; 
Honest labor bears a lovely face; 
Then hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny! 

Can'st drink the waters of the crisped spring ? 

O sweet content! 
Swimm'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears ? 

O punishment! 
Then he that patiently want's burden bears 
No burden bears, but is a king, a king! 
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content! 
Work apace, apace, apace, apace; 
Honest labor bears a lovely face; 
Then hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny! 

Almost equally beautiful though less musical is Dekker's 
grave lyric, "O sorrow, sorrow, say where dost thou dwell," 
the more especially when we remember how the author spent 
his days in unremittent drudgery, a slave to pawn-broking old 
Henslowe, always in poverty and often in the debtor's prison. 
There is something inexpressibly touching in the thought of 
such a man singing of sweet content, and of the inequality of 
fortune,the withering of virtue's fair branches, and the dwelling- 
place of sorrow. If it is the man beneath that is precious in 
literature, we can spare many sweet sonnets and gay courtly 
fopperies for a few poems such as these. Closely allied to 
Dekker in spirit is Nash, the writer of even fewer lyrics. It 



THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE 203 

is in Summer's Last Will, Nash's one drama, that we find his 
lyrics, "Fading Summer" and "Death's Summons." These 
two poems assume to us a new and terrible import when we 
remember the grim and horrible visitant which was London's 
every few years, the plague. This play was written in a plague 
year and the refrain of "Death's Summons" consists of the 
very words of the official inscription, "Lord have mercy on 
us," which, with a cross, was affixed to the doors of what 
were called "visited houses." 

The wider popularity on which the contemporary drama 
was based as compared with the choicer art of the musical 
composers results in the circumstance that lyrics incidental 
to plays are far less the reflection of foreign models. The 
latter, however, reflect passing fashions in English poetry with 
much faithfulness. The songs of Lyly and Peele are full of 
the pastoral and classical spirit preceding 1590. Shakespeare's 
earliest comedies exhibit the same tendency. The two 
gentlemen of Verona were, neither of them, shepherds, but a 
pretty song of that play asks: 

Who is Sylvia ? what is she 

That al] our swains commend her ? 

The succeeding sonnet humor is well illustrated in Love's 
Labor 's Lost, although none of the sonnets of that play are used 
for songs. The sonnet does not ordinarily set well to music, 
as the decasyllabic line is rather long for the average song- 
phrase, and the integral form cannot be split into short stanzas. 
None the less sonnets have been so set. Some of Campion's 
airs have words in th's form. 

The songs of Shakespeare are scattered through his plays 
and are of a lyrical beauty and variety which it is impossible 
to overpraise. More than twenty of them have been trans- 
mitted to us with music actually or traditionally known to 
have been used within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; 
and this number is materially raised by the circumstance that 
several of them exist in more than one contemporary version. 
Within the range of Shakespeare's own life Thomas Morley, 
Richard Johnson, Robert Jones, John Wilson, and other com- 



204 LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 

posers, unknown, set songs to music in As Ton Like It, Muck 
Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, The 
Tempest and other plays; whilst some of the poems of The 
Passionate Pilgrim were set by Thomas Weelkes and anony- 
mous composers. As might be expected a large number of 
these songs must have been sung to melodies already well 
known. Whether some of them were set before the perform- 
ance of the play and thus added to its attraction, or after, be- 
cause of the popularity of the words, we can not say. The 
traditional tunes which have been handed down for generations 
have been more or less modernized in the process; but many 
of them contain enough of their probable original to support 
their claims. With the beautiful and to us old-fashioned set- 
tings of Shakespeare's songs by Dr. Purcell, by Hilton, Ban- 
nister, and others, in the generations after Shakespeare's 
death, we are not here concerned. 

If the body of lyrics incidental to plays and masques be 
compared with an equal amount of lyrical verse of the period 
from Lyly to Ford, the dramatists will be found to hold their 
own in variety and originality of subject, in diversity and 
adaptability of meter, and to possess above all their contem- 
poraries — not even excepting Campion and his group — the 
power of making words sing. Here as in everything that he 
touched Shakespeare is the greatest. There are no lyrics like 
his, from dainty little ditties such as "It was a lover and his 
lass" or the fairy music of Puck and Ariel, to the exquisite 
"Dirge" of Cytnbeline: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun." 
If you are visited by doubts as to whether so ethereal a thing as , 
you suppose a lyric to be, can be made to present a scene of 
homely realism and yet preserve its quality as a lyric, read the 
song, "When icicles hang by the wall," with which Love's La- 
bor 's Lost closes, and your doubts will be forever laid to rest. 
If you can withstand the gross temptations of "Back and side 
go bare, go bare," be careful not to get some of Shakespeare's 
lilting bacchanal rimes into your head, lest you fall into an 
undue appreciation of "cakes and ale." 

All of the predecessors of Shakespeare were accomplished 
metrists and the diversity and inventiveness of their lyrical 



THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE 205 

measures remain the admiration and delight of those who read 
their exquisite poetry. But here, too, as elsewhere, regal 
Shakespeare comes into his own, wielding an imperious scepter 
over all and claiming alike the vassalage of classical experi- 
ment, Italian importation, and sterling old English freedom 
in verse. It was Shakespeare who could manage the ripple 
of the redundant syllable and the contretemps of the substituted 
trochee. He compassed the mystery of that most difficult of 
English meters, trochaic octosyllables and, with the solitary 
exception of Campion, is the only Elizabethan lyrist who 
essayed the effect of a change within the stanza from one to 
another metrical system. The beautiful dirge of Twelfth 
Night is a much-quoted example of the kind in which the 
anapests slow down into iambics towards the close of each 
stanza : 

Come away, come away, death, 
And in sad cypress let me be laid; 

Fly away, fly away, breath, 
I am slain by a fair cruel maid. 

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, 
O prepare it! 

My part of death, no one so true 
Did share it. 

Equally felicitous is the change to the refrain of the famous 
song of As Tou Like It: 

Who doth ambition shun. 

And loves to live i' the sun, 

Seeking the food he eats, 

And pleased with what he gets, 
Come hither, come hither, come hither: 

Here shall he see 

No enemy 
But winter and rough weather. 

With respect to choice and treatment of material, the lyrists 
of the age fall into three groups: those that modeled their 
work either on foreign or English literary models, the bookish 
poets, analogous to the bookish dramatists; those who, setting 



2o6 LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 

great store on originality, gave to the world their own, such 
as it was; and those who based their art on popular taste, 
tradition, story, and balladry, Shakespeare belongs to the 
last of these groups. Many of his songs are bits of folk-poetry, 
crystallized into permanent artistic form by the interposition 
of the poet's genius. The universality of that genius is more 
largely due to the trait which makes Shakespeare, in drama 
and lyric, the artistic form-giver to the popular spirit of his 
race, than to any other one thing. The man who seeks to 
raise popular appreciation to a standard which he has taken 
beyond his age, has the sheer weight of the world to move 
without a fulcrum. The man who rides on the crest of a wave 
of popular advance or popular emotion receives his own im- 
petus from that wave and, like the very spirit of the storm, 
may come to lead whither he will. The dramatic require- 
ments of certain situations demanded the singing of familiar 
tunes, even if the words were somewhat adapted. Such are 
the songs of the distraught Ophelia, and the grave-digger's 
in the same play, the "ballads" of Autolycus and the catches 
of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. In plays such as 
A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Tempest there was 
opportunity for greater originality. From the earliest times 
an ability to sing must have been an essential of the actor's 
profession. In the boy-companies everybody could sing, for 
that was the chorister's first duty. We may infer that the- 
atrical music in the reign of Elizabeth was of a far higher 
general grade than now, both in its originality and in the ex- 
cellence of its performance. 

Excepting Shakespeare, the two greatest lyrists of this 
class are Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Fletcher learned his 
lyrical as he learned his dramatic art of Shakespeare; and in 
his songs has caught much of the Shakespearean lightness 
and winged delicacy. He displays the same facile grace and 
ease of expression, the same mastery of effect combined with 
a complete absence of effort that form distinctive traits of his 
dramatic works. Shakespeare need not have been ashamed 
of this dirge from The Maid's Tragedy: 



SONGS OF FLETCHER AND OTHERS 207 

Lay a garland on my hearse 

Of the dismal yew; 
Maidens, willow branches bear; 

Say, I died true. 

My love was false, but I was firm 

From my hour of birth; 
Upon my buried body lie 

Lightly, gentle earth; 

nor of the fine song in The Two Noble Kinsmen, and many- 
others. Fletcher, and more especially Beaumont, begin to 
show a satirical and cynical strain in the lyric which was not 
common to the earlier age. When Beaumont sings: 

Never more will I protest 
To love a woman but in jest: 
For as they cannot be true, 
So to give each man his due 
When the wooing fit is past. 
Their affection cannot last; 

we may be sure that he has come under an influence not to be 
found in the earlier lyrists, and matchable only in Donne in 
one of his most characteristic moods. 

Save for a few well-known poems of the very best lyrical 
quality, Jonson's lyrics contributed to dramas and especially 
to the masques lose much by excision from their context; and 
yet his masques are full of beautiful poetry of this kind in 
which the classicality of his style, his love of form and genuine 
originality all show themselves to advantage. Discussion 
of the poetry of Jonson may best be deferred for the treatment 
of it in its larger aspects. In the masques, too, of Daniel, 
Campion of course, and of minor writers may be found many 
beautiful songs which the art of contemporary musicians ren- 
dered acceptable to the refined and fastidious taste of the courts 
of Queen Elizabeth and King James. 

Returning to the more popular drama, Heywood wrote 
many songs, some of rare excellence, such as "Pack clouds 
away" in Lucrece, and "Ye little birds that sit and sing" from 



2o8 LYRICS SET TO MUSIC 

The Fair Maid of the Exchange. There Is a freshness and 
genuine love of nature in Heywood that saves his lyrics from 
the effect of artifice which belongs to some of the best vs^ork 
of more polished poets. Heywood is also responsible for many 
mock-songs, as they were called; they do not add to his fame, 
but they enjoyed great popularity in their day. Among the 
other great dramatists, Chapman and Marston alone are 
devoid of song. Chapman because, like Spenser, he needed 
a larger vehicle in which to convey his poetical freight; Mar- 
ston, possibly because the lyric vein was not in him. Middle- 
ton's songs are, the best of them, of incantation, as in The 
Witch, or of the mock type. Lastly, Webster, our master-poet 
in the domain of the terrible, has left us at least one lyric which 
deserves a place with Shakespeare's best. That is his im- 
mortal dirge from Vittoria Coromhona, with which this chapter 
may fittingly close: 

Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren, 

Since o'er shady groves they hover, 

And with leaves and flowers do cover 
The friendless bodies of unburied men. 
Call unto his funeral dole 
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole. 
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm. 
And, when gay tombs are robbed, sustain no harm; 
But keep the wolf far thence, that 's foe to men, 
For with his nails he il dig them up again. 

It is of this poem that Charles Lamb wrote: "I never saw any- 
thing like this funeral dirge, except the ditty which reminds 
Ferdinand of his drowned father in The Tempest. As that is 
of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both 
have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself 
into the element which it contemplates." 



CHAPTER XII 

EPIC, NARRATIVE, AND PASTORAL VERSE 

SAVE for the broken torso of that beautiful triumph of 
romantic art and mingled medieval allegory. The Faery 
Queen, the age of Elizabeth produced no great epic; and even 
The Faery Queen fulfils the conditions of a vs^orld epic only 
partially, as its inspirations, Jerusalem Delivered and Orlando 
Furioso, fulfil them, and belongs, with all its merits, its charm, 
and its luxuriance of beauty, to its age" and not v^ith the Iliad, 
the Divina Comedia, and Paradise Lost to all time. But 
however the epic, defined in its strictness, may have fallen 
short in the dramatic and lyrical age that gave the world Shake- 
speare's plays and his sonnets, narrative poetry in the wider 
sense was neither neglected nor unpopular. 

In the first chapter of this book our subject was the litera- 
ture of fact, that extraordinary literary outburst that followed 
on the rebirth of national consciousness, an outburst which 
reached its height with the repulse of the Armada and fell olF 
into mere echoes of the sonorous past in the reign of King 
James. This literature was couched not alone in prose chron- 
icles and historical dramas but from the very first was wont to 
find an almost equally popular expression in narrative verse. 
The Mirror for Magistrates, that strange composite, the work 
of some fifteen authors and the growth of fifty years, is 
elegiac rather than narrative, reminiscent of the fates of fallen 
princes rather than descriptive of their actual careers; and 
yet The Mirror begot a numerous progeny. Except for 
Churchyard's narrative of Shore's Wife, the first historical 
poem modeled on the separate "legends," as they were called, 
of The Mirror for Magistrates was The Complaint of Rosa- 
mund which Daniel published in 1592. Samuel Daniel was 
a Taunton man, the son of a music-master. He received his 
education, as we have seen, at Oxford, leaving, however, 

209 



210 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

before receiving his degree. He became a tutor to the Herberts 
and other noble families and doubtless traveled in this capacity 
into Italy v^^hence he brought back the Italianate practice of 
sonneteering. He w^as of the Sidneian circle, and later of 
Queen Anne of Denmark's household; and he was early 
encouraged by the friendship and praise, in his Colin Clout, of 
Spenser himself. Even Nash approved Daniel's Rosamund, 
which the author soon republished "augmented." Like its 
models in The Mirror, The Complaint of Rosamund is elegiac 
in character and full of moralizing of no very original kind. 
But it is gracefully and well written as is all Daniel's poetry. 
In the next year no less than five poems of this sort appeared, 
treating, besides other topics, of the well-known historical 
figures of Robert of Normandy, Piers Gaveston, and Richard 
II, the work of men like Lodge, Drayton, and Giles Fletcher. 
The composition of such poems continues far into the reign 
of King James in the works of obscure as well as of better 
known writers and in poems discoursing of Queen Matilda, 
Owen Tudor, and Queen Katherine, of Edward IV and his 
courtship of Lady Gray, of the Lollard, Oldcastle, of Hum- 
phrey of Gloucester, and above all in the favorite theme of 
the age, the rise and fall of Richard III and "the preserva- 
tion of King Henry VII." 

But Daniel had long since attempted more ambitious his- 
torical poetry than this. In 1595 first appeared his Civil 
Wars, enlarged to eight books in the final edition of 1609. 
The History of the Civil Wars details, in an easy and graceful 
stanza of eight riming lines, the principal events in the history 
of England from the misrule of Richard II to the marriage 
of Edward IV, thus covering the same ground as Shakespeare's 
Richard II, the two plays on Henry IV, that on Henry V, and 
the three on Henry VI. It was Daniel's purpose to complete 
his epic up to the accession of Henry VII, the first Tudor king. 
But as the work lagged on, despite its popularity, into the 
reign of King James, there was no reason to carry out the 
original plan. Daniel ambitiously took for his model no less 
a work than the Pharsalia of Lucan; and it can not be denied 
that the English poet is animated throughout by a true pa- 



HISTORICAL POEMS OF DRAYTON 211 

triotism of heart and a fine sustaining faith in the greatness of 
his country. But the Wars of the Roses offer no such theme 
as the struggles of Pompey and Caesar; nor was Daniel a 
match for the clever Roman. The Civil Wars is not without 
grace and merit as a poem; but with all his rhetoric and sedu- 
lous deliberation, Daniel never reaches a true epic height, and 
the rapid changes from one to another historical figure and 
episode are destructive of the least semblance of unity. 

This want Daniel's rival in the historical epic, Michael 
Drayton, sought to supply by taking Roger Mortimer for the'" 
hero of his poem, entitled on its first appearance in 1596 
Mortimeriados, later, on its completion and rewriting in 
ottava rima in 1603, The Barons' Wars. Drayton's is an 
abler poem than Daniel's. Its characters, Edward II, Isa- 
bella, and Mortimer, are those already immortalized in Mar- 
lowe's fine drama on that unfortunate monarch. Drayton 
maintains, too, throughout an heroic pitch, alike in the events 
of war and statecraft and in the passionate love of his hero for 
Queen Isabella. This was not Drayton's first attempt at 
historical verse, as his Legend of Piers Gaveston had been 
printed in 1593- In 1597 Drayton essayed another variety 
of historical poetry. England's Heroical Epistles is a series 
of imaginary letters in couplets, supposedly exchanged between 
royal and other historical lovers; and, though from its plan 
wanting in anything like real unity, is characterized by much 
dignity and beauty. In 1607 Drayton published his Legend 
of the Great Cromwell in a volume with the "legends" of 
Queen Matilda and Robert, Duke of Normandy, already written 
some years since. Though incessantly adapting his poetry 
to changed conditions, remodeling it, and revising, Drayton 
continued remarkably constant to early influences. His 
latest work in the "historical legend" by no means betters 
The Barons' Wars. And yet the finest single literary expres- 
sion of Elizabethan national spirit found utterance in a poem 
of Michael Drayton. But this is not his tedious narrative of 
The Battle of Agincourt, which he published late in the reign 
of King James when the martial fire that had animated Eliza- 
bethan England had long since faded into a memory, but in a 



212 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

single lyric that first saw the light in the Poems of 1605 and 
which Drayton included among his "Odes," and quaintly 
addressed "To my friends the Cambro-Britons and their 
Harp, his Ballad of Agincourt." 

Fair stood the wind for France, 
When we our sails advance. 
And now to prove our chance 

Longer not tarry, 
But put unto the main. 
At Caux, the mouth of Seine, 
With all his warlike train, 

Landed King Harry. 

And, turning to his men 
Quoth famous Henry then, 
"Though they to one be ten, 

Be not amazed; 
Yet have we well begun. 
Battles so bravely won 
Evermore to the sun 

By fame are raised," 

And ready to be gone. 
Armor on armor shone, 
Drum unto drum did groan, 

To hear was wonder; 
That with the cries they make 
The very earth did shake. 
Trumpet to trumpet spake. 

Thunder to thunder. 

The very tread of armies rings in lines like these, and later 
poets, in feebler ages than Drayton's, have not disdained to 
borrow both ideas and meter of the patriotic Elizabethan. 
As to the man, Michael Drayton was born in Warwick- 
shire in 1563. He apparently went to neither university, 
but was educated in the household of Sir Henry Goodere and 
enjoyed the patronage of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, one of the 
most liberal and universal patrons of poets and learned men 
of her day. To her he dedicated his Mortimeriados, although- 



WARNER'S "ALBION'S ENGLAND" 213 

he characteristically withdrew this dedication on revision. 
Drayton began the cultivation of poetry in early youth and 
remained throughout a long life more undividedly attached 
to his art than almost any man among his contemporaries. 
Aside from a trivial attempt in 1590, called The Harmony of 
the Church, Drayton's first publication was a series of nine 
eclogues, closely following the manner of Spenser, to which 
he gave the title Idea, the Shepherd's Garland, in 1593. This 
word "Idea" he transferred to the title of his series of son- 
nets, Idea 's Mirror, in the following year, not without a 
reference (if precisians will have it so) to a contemporary 
French title which has been already noticed. Of these sonnets 
and their writing we have already sufficiently heard in this 
book, and his later pastorals, the Polyolhion, and other works 
will claim our later attention. Drayton lived on to 1631 
highly honored and intimate, as we know from two or three 
anecdotes, with his fellow country man, Shakespeare. Dray- 
ton received the honor of burial in Westminster Abbey. 

We are apt to forget, if the number of editions of a man's 
work be any criterion, that next to Spenser Drayton, and 
then Daniel, enjoyed the greatest contemporary reputation 
as general poets during the lifetime of Shakespeare. But we 
must recall that besides these, their epic labors, both were 
notable lyrists and both dabbled in the drama, — Daniel with 
Senecan tragedies and exotic pastorals, Drayton on the pop- 
ular stage in Henslowe's mart, concealing his traffic with 
the stage in later time and feeling with Shakespeare the degra- 
dation of making himself a motley to the view of groundlings 
and common fellows. 

A third notable historical epic of the time was William 
Warner's Albion's England. Warner, who was a London 
attorney, wrote earlier than either Daniel or Drayton, his 
book appearing in 1586; and he is remarkable even at that 
date for his imperviousness to contemporary influences. Like 
Southwell, though in a very different field, Warner wrote in 
the manner of Gascoigne, Googe, and Turberville long after 
those earlier worthies were dead, employing habitually the 
long fourteeners for his epic verse. Albion's England is an 



214 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

episodic narrative poem professing for its general theme the 
history of England from "the division of the world after the 
flood to the coming of the Normans." It is full of incident 
and digression, and it may be suspected v/as more prized at 
times for its romantic stories — such as that of Argentile 
and Curan — than for its "history." Albion's England en- 
joyed, none the less, an immediate and deserved popularity 
from its patriotic sentiment and its homely and unpretentious 
style. Warner continued his chronicle to the accession of 
Queen Elizabeth in the edition of 1592; and a final, sixth, 
edition w^as printed in 1612 after the author's death, still, 
further enlarged to include some of the events of the reign of 
James. In 1604 an unsuccessful variation on the rimed - 
chronicle was attempted by Sir William Harbert, in his 
Prophecy of Cadwallader, "containing a comparison of the 
English Kings with many worthy Romans, from William 
Rufus to Henry V." This work has more merit than has 
usually been accorded it. Thomas Deloney's Crotvn Garland 
of Roses, 1613, is a collection of ballads on stories derived from 
English history, and of no particular merit. A further de- 
generation of historical verse is represented in scattered broad-, 
sides and ballads of which it is unnecessary here to speak. 
Taylor, "the Water Poet's" illustrated doggeral chronicle of 
English kings represents the final absorption of this sort of' 
verse chronicling: and Taylor falls without our period. 

Another group of narrative poems, distinctively of the 
Renaissance, and many of them of exquisite beauty, are those 
which describe, and in describing, extol the ecstasies of earthly' 
love. The age was franker in its speech and art than we, 
and dared openly to admire not only the cold and chiseled 
beauties of the Venus de Milo, but likewise the warm flesh 
tints of the same goddess of beauty as depicted by the florid 
brush of Correggio. Marlowe, translator of the Amores of 
Ovid when a lad at college, at a time when he should have been 
engaged with more modest classics, was the first among the 
greater English poets thus to celebrate the glories of corporal 
passion. In this Marlowe stands in striking contrast with' 
Spenser who, as the poet of chivalry, finds in restraint of 



MARLOWE'S "HERO AND LEAIsDER" 215 

passion and in a service devoted to beaut) Ls ideal of tn»c. 
love, as he finds in the metaphyscial discussions of th .; Pla- 
tonic philosophy, love's truest expression. MarloWv Hero 
and Leander is really an amplification of a classic;' ',?jem 
attributed to Musaeus. It was first printed in 159S as a frag- 
ment, and appeared later in the same year, coxf-pieted by the 
strenuous hand of George Chapman. TJ^Js lovers' tale of 
Hero and Leander is a poem of rich and varied beauty and 
finer in theme than either Venu\ and Adonis or Lucrece. 
Sensuousness is the note of }Azx\owe. as it is of Keats; and 
reticence was not a quality of Elizabethan times. But this 
is not the only characteristic of Marlowe's part in Hero and 
Leander. Marlowe's diction flows with limpid clearness; his 
imagery is exquisite and the story, in its simple outspokenness, 
as spoiitaneous and natural as the loves of Romeo and Juliet 
th-^msehes. Whether for its descriptive energy and eloquence 
or for its vivid and highly poetical portrayal of the effects of 
absorbing youthful passion on man and maid. Hero and Lean- 
der must remain one of the most astonishing poems in the 
language. In this passage we have Marlowe's ease, limpid- 
ity, and sufiiciency of phrase. His music, in its larger ca- 
dence, and the full glory and color of his poetical style must be 
sought in the poem itself. 

On this feast-day — O cursed day and hour! — 

Went Hero thorough Sestos, from her tower 

To Venus' temple, where unhappily. 

As after chanc'd, they did each other spy. 

So fair a church as this had Venus none: 

The walls were of discolor'd jasper-stone. 

Wherein was Proteus carved; and overhead 

A lively vine of green sea-agate spread, 

Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung. 

And with the other wine from grapes out-wrung. 

And in the midst a silver altar stood: 
There Hero, sacrificing turtles' blood, 
Veiled to the ground, veiling her eyelids close; 
And modestly they opened as she rose: 



2i6 NAxv.v-x^rx. ...,^ PASTORAL VERSE 

Thciice flew Love's arrow with the golden head; 

And thus L^^ander was enamoured. 

Stone-still he stood, and evermore he gazed. 

Till with the fire, that from his countenance blaz'd, 
'^'jitfiientinf;; Hero's gentle heart was strook: 

Such "fr'ce and virtue hath an amorous look. 

It lies noH^ o'^r power to love or hate, 

For wf'l in us :"'? overruled by fate. 

When two are stript, long ere the course begin, 

We wish that one woulJ lore, the other win, 

And one especially do we af ^ct. 

Of two gold ingots, like in each I'^^pect: 

The reason no man knows; let n suffice, 

What we behold is censured by our eyes. 
J^When both deliberate, the love is slight: 

Whoever loved that loved not at first sight ? 

Chapman's continuation which takes up the story from r'ne 
moment of the height of the lovers' joy, is no unworthy one; 
though we miss, in his full and sometimes difficult and labored 
lines, the clear sweetness of the earlier poet. 

The next poem of this type, if indeed it may not have pre- 
ceded Marlowe's, is Thomas Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla in 
the story of which a nymph courts an unwilling swain much 
as Venus courts Adonis in Shakespeare's poem, and with 
words and imagery of a honied sweetness that match the earliest 
Shakespearean manner. When we note that the meter of 
the two poems is also the same (a stanza of six lines, the first 
four alternately riming, the last two a couplet), and further 
recall how invariably in all his work Shakespeare followed 
whither others led, the conclusion is complete that Lodge's 
poem was the model of Shakespeare's. Venus and Adonis is 
termed in the dedication to his patron, the Earl of Southamp- 
ton, "the first heir of his increase," and its erotic uncontrol 
confirms the statement. The poem was printed in I593> the 
year of Marlowe's death, and enjoyed an immediate repute, 
running through seven editions before the conclusion of Eliza- 
beth's reign. Nor was The Rape of Lucrece, which appeared 
in 1594, much less popular, although the theme is more serious 
and its treatment more dramatic and earnest. Neither of 



SHAKESPEARE'S NARRATIVE POEMS 217 

these love tales is frivolous in Shakespeare's hands The 
one, as it has been described, is, "of the innocence of early 
manhood that is proof against the blandishments of Venus; 
the other of the innocence of v^omanhood, outraged by man's 
lust, and choosing death to set the pure soul free from the 
prison of a tainted body." Coleridge dilated on the promise 
and immaturity of these tvv^o poems of Shakespeare. The 
latter quality needs no illustration; their promise Coleridge 
finds in the consummate sweetness of their versification and 
the remoteness of their subject-matter from the poet's ow^n 
life and emotions; for it is the second-rate man, not the truly 
great, who thrusts forward his own experiences and emotions 
to the uninterested gaze of strangers. Coleridge likewise 
found here that minute and faithful imagery which is every- 
where Shakespeare's and, in Lucrece, a full promise of that 
true philosophy of life that enables Shakespeare so invariably 
to see things in large, so little unsteadied by the unessentials 
that surround them. In Coleridge's own words," Shakespeare 
possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet, — deep 
feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the 
eye in the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and 
appropriate melody; that these feelings were under the com- 
mand of his own will; that in his very first productions he 
projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, 
and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with him- 
self, except by force of contemplation and that sublime faculty 
by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates. 
To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and 
natural objects, without which no man could have observed 
so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very 
minutest beauties of the external world." 

Of the other poems of this class it is not needful to say 
much. Marston the dramatist's first work. The Metamor- 
phosis of Pigmalions Image, 1598, deserved the order of the 
Archbishop of Canterbury that it be burned wherever found, 
and Marston's subsequent excuse that he wrote it to turn 
ridicule on amatory poetry is a piece of Marstonian imperti- 
nence. Salmacis and H ermaphroditus , 1602, has been attrib- 



2i8 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

uted to Francis Beaumont, but is unworthy alike of his taste 
and his genius. For its exquisite lusciousness Britain's Ida, 
which treats of the loves of Venus and Anchises, was attributed 
to Spenser on the title-page of the edition of 1628, but must 
be referred to his disciple, Phineas Fletcher. The others of 
the class are negligible until we reach Narcissus of James 
Shirley, published two years after Shakespeare's death, and 
a poem of unusual merit and beauty. 

The unexampled versatility of this extraordinary age did 
not even stop short of poetry on philosophy, statecraft, and 
topography, and extended Spenserian allegory diversely to 
religion and to human anatomy. Sir John Davies, of whom 
we have already heard as the author of a set of Gulling Son- 
nets, attained distinction in the law. In his youth he had 
written a series of Hymns to Astroea, 1599, each an acrostic 
constructed on the words "Elizabeta Regina," and surprisingly 
good considering such limitations. Davies likewise wrote a 
clever jeu d' esprit in verse called Orchestra or a Poem on Dan- 
cing, 1596, in which he represents Antinous, chief of the suitors 
of Penelope, arguing with that constant lady to prove the art 
of Terpsichore the move-all and be-all of the world. In 1599 
appeared Davies interesting philosophical poem, Nosce 
Teipsum, "a discourse in two elegies," so runs the title, "first 
of humane knowledge, secondly, of the soul of man and the 
immortality thereof." Davies' work has been well described 
as " a popular exposition of current ideas by a man who has 
no distinctive opinions." He maintains "with the agreeable 
assurance of a ready dialectician" that "all learning is uncer- 
tain and vain except knowledge of self and God"; and he has 
contrived to set forth these metaphysical commonplaces in 
language absolutely simple and direct, adorned with graceful 
and fitting illustration, and expressed in admirably competent 
verse. Nosce Teipsum is as typical a representative of Eliza- 
bethan popular philosophy as the Essay on Man is typical of 
the popular thought of the time of Queen Anne; nor can 
Davies' work be esteemed a less successful piece of that hybrid, 
metaphysical poetry. In reading some of its smooth and even 
stanzas we can not but wonder whether Pope did not know 



GREVILLE'S POEMS OF STATE 219 

more of it than he might have been willing to confess. And 
we note with interest that Davies' stanza — which is that of 
Gray's Elegy, a quatrain of decasyllabic verse alternately 
riming — is also the same which Dryden used and so praised 
Davenant for "inventing" thirty years after the death of 
Davies. 

Fulke Greville, the early friend of Sidney, Is the author of 
no less than five poetical ^'Treatises," as he called them, on 
Human Learning, Fame and Honor, War, Monarchy and 
Religion, first printed posthumously in 1633 in Certain Learned 
and Elegant Works. It is doubtful whether they may not 
have been written at least in part within the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth. On their political side these abstract and often 
difficult poems deal in a spirit of mingled frankness and irony 
with their great themes, paralleling the counsels of Macchia- 
velli in his Prince in parts but maintaining throughout that 
strange Calvinistic stoicism which is characteristic elsewhere 
of their exceedingly interesting author. Greville's Treastise 
of Human Learning not only links on to Davies' Nosce Teip-s. 
sum, with which it agrees as to the limitations and vanities 
of human knowledge, but comes into contact as well with 
Bacon's manifesto of the new science. The Advancement 
of Learning, printed in 1605. It falls, tdo, into contrast with 
Daniel's fine poem Musophilus, or a General Defence of all 
Learning, 1599, which in a dialogue between Musophilus, the 
lover of the Muses, and Philocosmus, the worldly man, en- 
thusiastically upholds the "holy skill" of letters and stands 
opposed alike to the popular agnosticism of Davies, to the 
"practical utility" of Bacon, and to the "moral utility of 
Greville." Daniel has well been considered one of the last_ 
of the humanists; for in him was combined, to the full, the 
love of learning and the appreciation of the dignity of the 
scholar, with a fine loyalty to England and faith in the great 
destiny of the English tongue. The following apostrophe 
to "heavenly Eloquence," recently quoted by Mr. Court- 
hope, deserves transcription for its truly "imperial" prophecy 
of that spread and potency of our language which we have 
come now in part to know. 



220 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

Thou, that cans't do much more with one poor pen 

Than all the powers of princes can effect: 

And draw, divert, dispose, and fashion men 

Better than force or rigor can direct. 

Should we this instrument of glory then 

As th' unmaterial fruit of shades neglect ? 

Or should we careless come behind the rest 

In power of words that go before in worth, 

Whereas our accents, equal to the best. 

Is able greater wonders to bring forth. 

Where all that ever hotter spirits exprest 

Comes bettered by the patience of the north. 

And who in times knows whither we may vent 

The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores 

This gain of our best glory shall be sent, 

T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? 

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 

May come refined with accents that are ours ? 

Or who can tell for what great work in hand 

The greatness of our style is now ordained. 

What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command, 

What thoughts let out, what humors keep restrained. 

What mischief it may powerfully withstand. 

And what fair ends may thereby be attained ? f 

Returning to the honorable name of Michael Drayton, as 
early as 1598 he is reported to have been engaged on a work 
called Polyolhion^ printed in part in 1613, and completed in 
thirty "songs" in 1622. The title describes this truly sur- 
prising work as "a chorographical description of all the tracts, 
rivers, mountains, forests and other parts of this renov^ned 
isle of Great Britain, w^ith intermixture of the most remarkable 
stories, antiquities, wonders, rareties, pleasures, and com- 
modities of the same . . . digested into a poem by Michael 
Drayton." It is amazing in a work of such stupendous 
length and with subject-matter by its nature so monotonous, 
how uniformly poetical the author has contrived to be. Poly- 
olbion is truly a production without parallel in the annals of 
any literature; for as Lamb said, Drayton "has not left a 1 
rivulet so narrow that it may be stepped over without honor- 



DRAYTON'S "POLYOLBION" 221 

able mention, and has associated hills and streams with life 
and passion beyond the dreams of old mythology." This 
grand and patriotic theme, the celebration of his fatherland, 
Drayton must have derived from the unfulfilled dreams of the 
old antiquary Leland. Selden, the famous scholar and pub- 
licist, did not disdain to adorn the earlier part of Draytons* 
work with learned notes and commentary, and the original 
editions are illustrated with quaint maps in which the personi- 
fied geniuses of town and country are represented bodily to the 
view. Ridiculous as it may seem thus to personify every hill 
and metamorphose every stream into a classical nymph or 
river god, and alien as is Drayton's old alexandrine verse to 
our modern tastes, no one reading in the Polyolhion can fail 
to recognize the poet in Drayton and to treat with becoming 
respect these labors of a by-gone time that stand like huge 
Pelasgian walls, inexplicable from the hands of men as men 
are now. 

Despite the many other poetical influences that give to the 
age of Elizabeth a variety in quality and kind not surpassed 
in Victorian times, the dominant concord of Spenser's sweet 
verse was heard strong and constant in the poetical concert 
that continued for a generation after his death. Spenser's 
allegory, his continuousness, his delight leisurely to dwell on 
beautiful details, his diffuseness and carelessness as to design 
or as to ultimately landing from the crystal flood of his on- 
flowing verse anywhere: all of these qualities were perpet- 
uated in his kind, though no one of the Spenserians reaches 
a place beside his master. 

Allusion has already been made to the poetical Fletchers. 
Besides John, the great dramatist, and Giles the elder, his 
uncle, who wrote sonnets in the sonnet time and traveled into 
Muscovy, there were the two Spenserians, sons of Giles, 
named Phineas and Giles the younger; and there was like- 
wise, somewhat later, a religious poet Joseph Fletcher, who 
does not, however, concern us Phineas Fletcher was born 
in 1582; Giles, his brother, some three or four years after. 
Both were educated at Cambridge and both entered the church, 
leading useful if uneventful lives. Giles the younger died 



222 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

early, in 1623; Phineas was alive in 1649. The frequent 
allusions in their poetry, each to the other, disclose the warm 
brotherly affection between them, and their poetical kinship 
is as close as that of their blood. 

Christ's Victory and Triumph by Giles Fletcher the 
younger was published at Cambridge in 1610. It is an 
ambitious epic poem in the manner of Spenser, treating of 
Christ's victory in heaven, on earth, his triumph over death, 
and his triumph after death. The subject is overlaid with 
an exuberance of allegory, typifying and personifying the 
emotions and passions, and is full of passages of exquisite 
poetical imagery. Giles Fletcher attempts a variation on the 
famous Spenserian stanza, reducing it to eight lines by the 
omission of the sixth. Christ's Victory and Triumph is a 
beautiful poem of its type and throbs at times witlr'the true; 
religious fervor which distinguishes the rapturous religious 
poetry of Richard Crashaw. Phineas Fletcher's contribu- 
tion to the poetry of this class is almost equally successful, if 
more curious in kind. The Purple Island was first printed 
in 1633. It is the opinion of Dr. Grosart, Fletcher's editor, 
that the poem was substantially written as we have it early 
in the days of King James, an opinion true in the main, if 
perhaps questionable as to those passages which show a grasp 
and understanding of Harvey's famous discovery of the cir- 
culation of the blood, a first announcement of which was made 
by him in a lecture in the year of the death of Shakespeare. 
The Purple Island is "an elaborate allegorical description of 
the human body and of the vices and virtues to which man is 
subject." The body is figured as an island, the bones its 
foundation, the veins its streams, and so on into a multiplicity 
of minute detail, though it is fair to state that the poem has a 
wider scope and rises in the later cantos to an allegory of man's 
intellectual processes, his emotions, and even of his religious 
ideas. The whole is framed in a pastoral setting and many 
are the passages which for truth to picturesque nature, poetic 
beauty of expression, and musical flow of verse are worthy 
the inspiration of their great master, Spenser. It seems hardly 
fair to quote from so fine a poem a passage which emphasizes 



ECLOGUES AND PASTORALS 223 

its chief defect. Yet the following is alone enough to show 
what Spenserian allegory could become when ingenuity tri- 
umphed, as it did only too often in long, uninspired reaches of 
the Spenserians, over poetic inspiration. The poet — or 
rather the allegorist — has been describing the human mouth 
as an "arched cave." He continues: 

At that cave's mouth twice sixteen porters stand, 

Receivers of the customary rent; 
Of each side four — the foremost of the band — 

Whose office to divide what in is sent: 
Straight other four break it in pieces small; 
And at each hand twice five, which grinding all. 
Fit it for convoy and this city's arsenal. 

In The Purple Island and in Christ's Victory and Triumph 
we have Spenserian allegory, Spenserian epic continuity, even 
an imitation of Spenserian stanza, for The Purple Island is 
written in the meter of Christ's Victory, which we have seen 
was a variation — not an improvement — on the stanza of 1^ ^ 
The Faery Queen. But the influence of Spenser in the pas- 
toral was even more pervasive and lasting. A list of English 
eclogues following The Shepherds' Calendar and running not 
beyond the lifetime of Shakespeare, includes the names of 
Peele, Watson, Barnfield, Lodge, Sabbie, Drayton, William 
Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke. Of 
these an unimportant Eclogue Gratulatory, addressed to the 
Earl of Essex, was published by Peele in 1589. Thomas 
Watson's Melihoeus, an elegy on the death of the queen's 
secretary. Sir Francis Walsingham, was written first in Latin 
and translated by the author in the following year. Watson 
was the author of other Latin eclogues. Barnfield's Affection- t/ 
ate Shepherd, four years later, is a free following of the Ver- 
gilian eclogue, and the work of a rare young poet of whom 
it may be said that he deserved the confusion which long 
existed between some of his lyrics and Shakespeare's. Lodge 
wrote both eclogues of an amatory and of a meditative cast. 
The first are found in Phillis honored with Pastoral Sonnets, 
1593; the second form part of his little volume entitled A 
Fig for Momus, and appeared two years later. In these 



224 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

latter Lodge displays his literary relations to Spenser, Dray- 
ton, and Daniel, whom he celebrates under guise of pastoral 
names, and shows, like Spenser before him, that he had read 
the popular eclogues of Mantuan. Lodge is always a sweet 
poet and a master of musical effect; but he is happier in the 
lyric pastoral than in the eclogue. Pan s Pipe by Francis 
Sabbie of the same date is described in the title as "three 
pastoral eclogues in English hexameters," It is a less nota- 
ble work and equally referable to previous models. William 
Basse's three pastoral elegies, published in 1602, really form 
a short pastoral romance. Like his later work, beyond our 
period, they are possessed of little merit. 

The most important of Spenser's followers in the reign of 
Queen Elizabeth was Drayton, whose industry and genuine 
poetic gift once more inspire and hold our esteem. It was 
in 1593 that Drayton published his Idea, the Shepherd's 
Garland fashioned into Nine Eclogues; a tenth with much 
revision of the rest appeared in 1606; and towards the end of 
his career the poet returned to the pastoral mode in his Muses' 
Elizium as he had still practised it as occasion arose through- 
out the Polyolhion and elsewhere. The Shepherds' Calendar 
was undoubtedly the model of the young poet, although The 
Shepherd's Garland is knit in no such close continuity as 
Spenser's poem. Drayton's pastorals, too, are less weighted 
with serious matter moral and religious and freer from veiled 
satire. Like Spenser's they sound the full gamut of the oaten 
reed, treating of love requited and unrequited, eulogizing the 
queen in a fine ode, and meditating "in higher strains." 
Drayton uses a great variety of meters, is full of genuine 
touches of nature, and musical with the choice lyrical gift of 
his time. 

We may pass such a production of mixed verse and prose 
as England's Mourning Garment Worn by Plain Shepherds, 
wherein Henry Chettle, memorable as the editor of Greene's 
Groatsworth of ^?V, lamented the death of "Elizabeth, queen 
of virtue, while she lived, and theme of sorrow, being dead." 
It is chiefly interesting for his arraignment of the poets Warner, 
Chapman, Jonson, Shakespeare, Drayton, and others for not 



LATER SPENSERIANS 225 

singing threnodies to her deceased majesty. Shakespeare, 
especially, under the pastoral name of Melicert, is adjured to 

Drop from his honied Muse one sable tear, 
To mourn her death that graced his desert, 
And to his lays opened her royal ear. 

There is record of the writing of twelve eclogues about this 
time by Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso. But only 
two of them and the fragment of a third are now extant. They 
are said to concern chiefly contemporary affairs, to deal with 
abuses in the church and in a panegyric of English maritime 
adventure. Minor pastoralists of the earlier years of King 
James were Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels from 1608 
to 1622, and Lewis Machin, a very small dramatist. The 
first used the eclogue form to celebrate the Plantagenet suc- 
cession in a curious poem entitled Daphnis Polystephanos, 
printed in 1605. Machin's three ecolgues, in easy but no 
. very distinguished verse, touch on erotic themes of the class 
ofHero and Leander and appeared affixed to a like production 
by William Barkstead, the actor, called Mirrha the Mother 
of Adonis, bearing date 1607. Needless to say, neither Fair- 
fax, Buc, nor Machin write in the manner of Spenser. 

The last group of Spenserians, all of them pastoralists, 
cluster about the closing years of Shakespeare's life. William 
Browne of Tavistock is chief among them, an amiable retiring 
man, possessed of a simplicity of character and heartfelt love 
of nature that remind us somewhat of Wordsworth, remote 
though Browne is from any trace of Wordsworth's power of 
spiritual insight. Browne lived between 1591 and 1643, He 
received his education at Exeter College, Oxford, Clifford's 
Inn, and the Inner Temple, for which last he wrote a beautiful 
masque. Like so many of the poets before him, Browne en- 
joyed the patronage and encouragement of the Herbert 
family, and his poetical impulse comes direct from the pas- 
toral poetry of Drayton, his acknowledged friend and sponsor. 
Besides Browne, there was Christopher Brooke, son of a 
wealthy tradesman who had been thrice mayor of his na- 
tive town of York, and a friend and intimate of Donne. 



226 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

George Wither, most voluminous of later pamphleteers, in 
whom the acid of satire spoiled one of the sweetest of poets, 
was the third; and John Davies of Hereford, the writing- 
master and author of many books in verse and prose, seems 
likewise to have been of their counsels. In 1613 appeared 
Browne's Britannia's Pastorals; in 1614, his Shepherd's 
Pipe, to which were added eclogues by the other three. In 
1615 Wither wrote his Shepherd's Hunting while a prisoner 
for libel in the Marshelsea, and in 1616 Browne issued a 
second instalment of Britannia's Pastorals, a third part re- 
maining until the last century in manuscript. In this group 
of pastoral poems we have by far the most important contri- 
bution of its kind to English literature and it is suprising to 
find how single an influence pervades this by no means in- 
considerable body of poetry. Wither's Shepherd's Hunting 
conceals an allegory of his ov/n imprisonment for "hunting" 
with his many hounds of satire (in his Abuses Stript and Whipt, 
161 1 ) the monsters of the country-side. Otherwise these 
eclogues are without ulterior allusion save to the pleasant 
poetical friendship of the little brotherhood. Story in these 
poems there is none, and their diffuseness far exceeds that of 
Spenser. But the readers of Browne and his fellows may feel 
sure that "at whatever page they open, they have not far to 
travel before they find entertainment." 

Browne is essentially a descriptive poet, his "mood is 
generally calm and quiet, like the painter of actual scenery." 
There is little movement in his poetry, a broken and meander- 
ing thread of story, and next to no human interest. Even his 
lyric moods, which are often graceful, have almost none of 
that glow and fervor which is characteristic of many of his 
contemporaries. The strongest trait of Browne, as of Dray- 
ton, is his devoted love of country; but where Drayton with 
impartial loyalty celebrates all England in particularizing 
each part, Browne, strong in his local affections, never strays 
far from his native Tavistock and realizes the dreams of 
Arcadia in the familiar features of his native Devonshire. 
Thus it is that Browne expresses himself in terms of this 
amiable provincialism: 



WILLIAM BROWNE 227 

Hail, thou, my native soil! thou blessed plot, 

Whose equal all the world affordeth not! 

Show me who can so many crystal rills; 

Such sweet-clothed valleys or aspiring hills; 

Such wood-ground pastures, quarries, wealthy mines; 

Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines; 

And if the earth can show the like again. 

Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men. 

Time never can produce men to o'ertake 

The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake, 

Of worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more 

That by their power made the Devonian shore 

Mock the proud Tagus; for whose richest spoil 

The boasting Spaniard left the Indian soil 

Bankrupt of store, knowing it would quit cost 

By winning this, though all the rest were lost. ' 

In conclusion of these paragraphs on the pastoralists that 
followed Spenser I shall quote not Drayton, most poetical and 
resourceful in this kind of poetry, nor Browne, who approached 
most nearly our modern conception of the touch with nature; 
but make some amends to excellent Phineas Fletcher, for 
having gibbeted his ingenious allegory, by choosing two or 
three stanzas from several of equal merit in his Purple Islandy 
that express to perfection this outworn ideal of the golden age. 

Thrice, oh thrice happy shepherd's life and state, 

When courts are happiness' unhappy pawns! 
His cottage low and safely humble gate 

Shuts out proud Fortune with her scorns and fawns; 
No feared treason breaks his quiet sleep: 
Singing all day, his flocks he learns to keep; 
Himself as innocent as are his simple sheep. 

Instead of music and base flattering tongues, 

Which wait to first-salute my lord's uprise; 
The cheerful lark wakes him with early songs, 

And birds' sweet whistling notes unlock his eyes: 
In country plays is all the strife he uses. 
Or sing, or dance unto the rural Muses; 
And but in music's sports, all diff"erences refuses. 



228 NARRATIVE AND PASTORAL VERSE 

His certain life that never can deceive him, 
Is full of thousand sweets and rich content: 

The smooth-leav'd beeches in the field receive him 
With coolest shades, till noon-tide rage is spent: 

His life is neither tost in boist'rous seas 

Of troublous world, nor lost in slothful ease; 

Pleased and full blest he lives, when he his God can please. 

His bed of wool yields safe and quiet sleeps. 

While by his side his faithful spouse hath place: 

His little son into his bosom creeps, 
The lively picture of his father's face: 

Never his humble house or state torment him; 

Less he could like, if less his God had sent him: 

And when he dies, green turfs with grassy tomb content him. 



CHAPTER XIII 

JONSON AND THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

THE greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries in the 
drama, a man historically even more important than 
Shakespeare himself, was Ben Jonson, poet, playwright, 
critic, satirist, laureate, and dictator of his time. Jonson 
was born in the year 1573, of a border family of Annandale, 
and was the posthumous son of a minister who had lost his 
estate by forfeiture in the reign of Queen Mary. His widow 
marrying again and beneath her, Jonson was "brought up 
poorly," but "put to school" at Westminster, and there be- 
friended by the learned antiquary,, Camden. Fuller states 
that from Westminster Jonson went to [St. John's College] 
Cambridge. If so, he remained but a short time; for he 
afterwards told Drummond that '*he was Master of Arts in 
both universities by their favor, not his study." The trade 
of his step-father, that of bricklaying, proving distasteful, 
Jonson enlisted as a soldier and relates that "in his service 
in the Low Countries,^' he had, "in the face of both the camps, 
killed an enemy and taken opima spolia from him." Jonson 
returned to London in 1592, married, and began writing for 
the stage, probably about i^^ In 1597 he was in the employ 
of jienslowe and acting as one of the Admiral's men; and in 
the following year he is included in Meres' roll of honor as 
one of the best contemporary writers of comedy. It was in 
that year that Jonson killed "in duel" a fellow actor, named 
Gabriel Spencer, for which offense he was tried at Old Bailey 
and found guilty. He escaped the gallows by pleading the 
benefit of clergy, but remained some time in prison. It was 
under the stress of these experiences that Jonspn. became, a 
RomarUCatholic; but he returned to the faith of the Church 
of^England after some ten or a dozen years. A pleasing 
tradition of this period relates that on his release Jonson 

229 



230 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

sought employment for his pen with Henslowe's rivals, the 
Lord Chamberlain's company, in which Shakespeare had 
already become a prominent shareholder; and that Every 
Man in his Humor was accepted by that company through 
the good offices of Shakespeare who, we know, acted a part. 
This was the corner-stone of Jonson's success, though in all 
likelihood by no means the first of his dramatic efforts. 

Every. MMniM his -Hurngr, acted in 159^8, is a satirical 
comedy of London life, skilfully constructed on the recogni- 
tion of two principles: the necessity of sketching direct from 
life and the desirability of drawing your picture in a manner 
already accepted as in accord with good art and a recognized 
method. The comedy runs on an exceedingly slender story, 
the mistake of a father as to the real character of his son, his 
following to observe him, and the consequences to both and 
to the little group of personages by whom they are surrounded. 
The general intermeddling of a man-servant, namedJBraitt 
worm^ possessed of a mania for fooling everybody, precipitates 
several situations; the rest are the results of some dominant 
trait of each character. In a word, in Every Man in his 
Humor we have an example of a new kind of comedy, con- 
sciously developed by Jonson on the basis of a very definite 
theory of life and art, and known as the comedy of humors. 
The word 'Ihumor" in the parlance of the day signified a 
superficial tendency or bias of disposition that so ruled a 
person, permanently or for the moment, that one could say,' 
this man affects gravity, this is a disconsolate lover, this third 
is a braggart or an affected fop. Jonson did not invent the 
word "humor"; and characters, thus conceived, were not only 
known to the stage before his time but were devised as made 
up of "humors" by Chapman a little before Every Man in 
his Humor. Jonson, extending this popular idea, held that 
a "humor" should be some overwhelming passion or,.ujQiniSr 
takable warp in character, such as.JB,rainworm's_.passioai_fQi; 
gulling everybody, Bobadil's mania of boasting though he is 
a coward at heart, or Downright, described in his name; and 
he avoided making his personages turn (as did some of his 
imitators) on petty affectations or mannerisms of speech. 



JONSON'S COMEDY OF HUMORS 231 

Moreover, he constructed his play out of this clash of incon- 
gruous humors, and was concerned less with a picture, much 
less a story, of actual life than with the opportunity which 
this method afforded him for devising ridiculous situations, 
witty dialogue, and unlooked-for outcomes. Life is not much 
like such a succession of the clever unexpected; though Jon- 
son's scenes can not be pronounced absolutely untrue to 
human nature. The characters of men in the world are not 
built up on such impossibly simple lines; yet the attention 
may not unfairly be directed to the ruling passion of a given 
personage, and personages, so possessed for the nonce, be 
chosen legitimately as subjects for the persons of comedy. 
In Every Man in his Humor Jonson succeeded surprisingly 
well in picturing, in vivid realism, the absurdities, the eccen- 
tricities and predicaments, so to speak, of Elizabethan life 
in terms of a glorified adaptation of the technique of Plautus. 
This new variety of the comedy of rnanners leaped into 
immediate acceptance and popularity. It was imitated by 
everybody, at times by those not fitted for it; it was parodied 
and misunderstood. It was used for single characters or 
groups of them, as an underplot or episode; and this concep- 
tion of stage character, degenerating frequently into carica- 
ture, continued to tinge the drama onward to the days of 
Sheridan, if not beyond. But we are not concerned with these 
wide influences. Among immediate effects, the word "humor" 
became current in colloquial speech and in titles of other plays: 
for example, Jonson himself reemployed it in Every Man out 
of his Humor and, later, in The Magnetic Lady or Humors 
Reconciled. There was an anonymous and inferior comedy 
called Every Woman in her Humor, 1600, imitating more than 
Jonson's title; and, besides Chapman's Humorous Days Mirth 
in 1599, Day wrote a sprightly comedy entitled Humor out 
of Breath, printed in 1608. As to Chapman, he was, in comedy 
at least, wholly of Jonson's school and method, as his admir- 
able All Fools, 1 599, and May Day, two years later,attest. Field 
was literally Jonson's scholar in the drama. But Jonson in 
this example of his comedy of humors was not even without 
his influence on the catholic and adaptable spirit of Shake- 



232 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

speare. It seems not irrational to refer such a group of humor- 
ists as FalstafF and his rout — Bardolph of the carbuncled 
nose, Pistol with his bombast scraps of plays, FalstafF himself 
of unmeasured girth, and that "minnow," his contrasted 
page — to this Jonsonian attempt to conceive theatrical per- 
sonages on lines of definite simplicity and salient quality. 
Dr. Caius and his group in The Merry Wives, and the typical 
Scotch, Welsh, and Irish soldiers of Henry V, are similiar 
examples. All these plays correspond in point of time with 
the new rage of the Jonsonian humor, as did many others by 
lesser men such, for example, as Oldcastle and The Merry Devil 
of Edmonton, in both of which like groups of humorists recur. 
During the next three years, from 1599 to 1602, Jonson 
was engaged in a theatrical struggle conducted by means of 
satirical dramas which is known to the history of the stage 
as the war of the theaters. Throughout the latter years of 
the reign of Queen Elizabeth the Chamberlain's company, 
acting continuously at the Globe, maintained its lead in the 
dramatic profession. Its principal rivals were the Admiral's 
men who occupied the Rose and moved, on its completion 
in 1600, to AUeyn's new Fortune Theater in Golding Lane, 
Cripplegate. In these years the companies of boy actors 
assumed an extraordinary importance. These were the Chil- 
dren of the Chapel Royal who occupied the private theater 
which Burbage had built in Blackfriars from the time of its 
erection, in 1596, and the Children of Paul's who appear to 
have acted in their singing-school attached to the cathedral. 
It has recently been argued, as we have seen above, that the 
prominence of the former company was due directly to royal 
patronage and that these boys, under the aggressive leader- 
ship of Nathaniel Giles, Master of the Queen's Chapel, were 
really maintained as actors, as well as singers for the Royal 
Chapel, out of the royal purse. At any rate, save for Shake- 
speare,they commanded the best pens of the moment, Jonson's 
among them; and they enjoyed, for two or three years, an 
unusual vogue because of the emphasis which they laid, in 
the plays written for them, on a general satire of the times and 
even on personal attack and lampoon. 



THE WAR OF THE THEATERS 233 

To be sure, satire was no new thing in the drama and there 
is reason to beheve that individual and personal attack had 
been employed on the stage not only privately, as at the 
universities, but publicly also and especially in the Martin 
Marprelate controversy, an account of which has been given 
in a previous chapter. The Marprelate plays have perished. 
Lyly and Nash were the dramatists chipfly concerned in them. 
As to the war of the theaters, or the "poetomachia," as Dekker 
called it, its origin is not certainly known. Some have re- 
ferred it to allusions of a satirical nature to Jonson, contained 
in a satire by John Marston entitled The Scourge of Fillainy. 
Jonson himself declared that "he had many quarrels with 
Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his 
Poetaster on him; the beginning of them were that Marston 
represented him on the stage." The "war" assumed two 
aspects from the first, the critical, in which Jonson arrogated 
to himself the censorship of poetry and the stage, and the 
personal, wherein he vigorously lampooned his enemies. We 
are certain that the principals were Jonson and Marston. 
Concerning the seconds and other aiders and abettors, much 
is dubious. Marston was two or three years the junior of 
Jonson, and was the son of a lawyer, sometime lecturer of the 
Inner Temple. He received his education at Brasenose 
College, Oxford, and his position among writers of non- 
dramatic satire in verse will receive our later consideration, 
Marston made a distinguished place for himself as a dramatist 
within the first decade of the century and, entering the church, 
lived on until 1634. He was an opinionated and self-satisfied 
young man of twenty-two in 1598, fresh from his classics at 
the university, and possessed of a conversancy with Italian 
which he had from his mother. Jonson, as the new writer 
of comedies of humors, just come into vogue, was as opin- 
ionated and self-complaisant in his success as was ever Mars- 
ton. It is likely that Jonson's hands were by no means clean 
when he was attacked by Marston. In The Case is Altered, 
a quasi-romantic comedy written before Every Man in his 
Humor but which Jonson never acknowledged, he had gib- 
beted several of his contemporaries satirically, among them 



234 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

Anthony Munday. In Every Man in his Humor he had quite 
as certainly satirized in Master Matthew the poet Daniel, 
against whom Jonson bore a continual grudge. DameThad 
already been the butt of dramatic satire at the hands^oTChettle 
and Dekker in one of the personages of Patient Grissel. It 
seems likely that Histriomastix, a play revised by Marston 
in 1598, contained in the character Chrisogonus, a poet, 
satirist, and translator, poor but contemptuous of the ignoble 
crowd, a picture of Jonson and one by no means discreditable 
to him. If this was intended by Marston as amends, Jonson 
refused so to construe it. It has even been surmised that this 
is the representation of Jonson on the stage to which the poet 
refers as the beginning of the quarrel.^ 

The first of Jonson's three great satires in dramatic form 
is Every Man out of his Humor, acted by the Chamberlain's 
company in 1599. Whatever differences may arise among 
students of the drama as to individual identifications, there can 
be no question that in this play Jonson lampooned several of 
his fellow poets, although the front of the satire is directed 
against citizen follies. Munday, Lodge, Daniel as Fastidious 
Brisk, "a spruce, afi'ected courtier," all have been thought to 
be the subject of Jonson's wit and scorn; whilst Carlo Buf- 
fone, "a public scurrilous and profane jester," was formerly 
supposed to be Marston (author of The Scourge of Villainy), 
especially because Carlo is pointedly alluded to as "the grand 
scourge or second untruss (that is satirist) of the time" 
(Joseph Hall having boasted himself the first). Of late, 
however, there has been a return to an old identification of 
Carlo Bufibne with a notorious person named Charles Chester 
in the following passage from gossipy and notoriously inac- 
curate John Aubrey. He relates that Chester was "a bold 
importunate fellow ... a perpetual talker, and made a 
noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir 
Walter Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth (that is his 

^ On this whole topic, see the excellent work of J. H. Penniman, 
7he War of the Theatres, Publications of the University of Penn- 
sylvania, 1897, and his forthcoming ed. of Poetaster and Satiro- 
mastix. 



THE WAR OF THE THEATERS 235 

upper and nether beard) with hard wax. From him Ben 
Jonson takes his Carlo BufFone (i.e. jester), in Every Man in 
his Humor." Is it conceivable that after all Jonson was 
ridiculing Marston and that the point of the satire consisted 
in part at least in an intentional confusion of the "grand 
scourge or second untruss" with "the scurrilous and profane" 
Chester ? 

Asper-Macilente is Jonson's complaisant picture of him- 
self, the calm, just, learned poet, carrying his brow high and 
unruffled in the midst of a pack of the yelping curs of detrac- 
tion. In 1600 followed Jonson's more elaborate satire, 
Cynthia s Revels or the Fountain of S elf-Love, this time acted 
by the Children of the Queen's Chapel, and still further 
advancing against his foes with the direct attack of his biting 
and galling satire. Here Marston is certainly ridiculed in 
the character Anaides, with Daniel, Lodge, and Munday as 
before. His personages Jonson designates characteristically 
under abstract names of Greek origin. Thus, Anaides 
(Impudence), Hedon (Pleasure), and Asotus (the Prodigal) 

— each accompanied by an appropriate female abstraction, 
Moria (Folly), Philautia (Self-Love), and Argurion (Money) 

— appear on the stage in brilliant and caustic dialogue, full 
of allusions, personal, social, local, everything but political, 
most of them lost to us (despite our most searching scholar- 
ship) but evidently affording an entertainment to the audiences 
of the day, equaled only by what we learn of Aristophanes in 
ancient Athens. Jonson himself figures as the righteous and 
judicious Crites. The reversion of Jonson here, as again 
in his latest plays, to the abstractions of the old morality and 
to the method of allegory is a striking characteristic of his 
strong English personality. It has been held that Jack 
Drum's Entertainment, another unavowed comedy of Marston, 
dating 1600, contains a second dramatic attack on Jonson in 
the character of a ridiculous Frenchman of licentious habits, 
Monsieur Fo de King; but this is questionable to say the 
least. A satirical scene of Marston's Antonio and Mellida, 
acted also in 1600, between Balurdo and a painter, has 
been regarded a parody of a similar scene between Hieronimo 



236 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

and a painter which occurs in that part of The Spanish 
Tragedy which we know that Jonson added by way of revision 
of Kyd's old work. But this assumes an earlier date for 
Jonson's revision than has yet been proved. 

Jonson's third and final dramatic satire was Poetaster, 
acted (once more by the Chapel Children) in 1601. Here 
his avowed quarry was the inferior poets of the time whaTfie 
declares, had provoked him with "their petulant styles" for 
years "on the stage." In a parable of the poetasters of ancient 
Rome, Crispinus and Demetrius, Jonson contrasts their 
spleen, stupidity, habits of literary theft, and their envy of 
Vergil and Horace, with the virtue, moral righteousness, and 
impeccability of these two, in the latter of whom we recognize, 
once more, Jonson's favorite portrait of himself. Jonson was 
answered soon after by Dekker in his Satiromastix, 1602, 
which he seems to have been engaged by others to write. 
Dekker thus really comes into the quarrel near to its conclusion 
and the circumstance that Satiromastix is clearly an unfinished 
play — really of chronicle type and evidently altered in haste 
for this specific purpose — makes this the more likely. From 
a literary point of view, Satiromastix can not be pronounced 
a good play, though clever and pointed enough. But the 
arrogance of Jonson and his outrageous self-righteousness 
caused the time to award the palm to his opponents; and this 
despite Jonson's tremendous superiority in every quality that 
goes to make up effective dramatic satire. The arrogance 
of Jonson reaches its height in Jn Apologetical Dialogue which 
he affixed to Poetaster, on its publication in 1602 and which 
he declares was "only once spoken on the stage." Here the 
poet represents himself in conversation with two obsequious 
and admiring friends concerning his dramatic and other opin- 
ions and in contemptuous, but only too mindful, neglect of 
his enemies. It adds to our wonder at the sublimity of Jon- 
son's arrogant self-esteem to learn that he acted himself, in 
this Dialogue, in propria persona. No lawsuits, however, 
appear to have resulted from these vituperative libels of the 
stage. And we find Jonson in friendship and collaboration 
with both Marston and Dekker a short time after. Hence 



JONSON IN COMEDY 237 

we may infer that there was no small amount of playing to 
the gallery in all this dramatic warfare. As a specimen of 
Jonson's swift satirical dialogue in its lighter vein, let us take 
the following. Fastidious Brisk, "a neat, spruce, affecting 
courtier, one that wears clothes well, and in fashion," and 
Puntarvolo, "a vain-glorious knight, wholly consecrated to 
singularity," are the chief interlocutors. Carlo Buffone, 
described as "a good feast-hound or banquet-beagle," bears 
a minor part. 

Fast. Good faith, signior, now you speak of a quarrel, I '11 
acquaint you with a difference that happened between a gallant and 
myself; Sir Puntarvolo, you know him if I should name him, Signior 
Luculento. 

Punt. Luculento! What inauspicious chance interposed itself 
to your two loves ? 

Fast. Faith, sir, the same that sundered Agamemnon and great 
Thetis' son; but let the cause escape, sir: he sent me a challenge 
mixed with some few braves, which I restored and in fine we met. 
Now, indeed, sir, I must tell you he did offer at first very desperately 
but without judgment: for, look you, sir, I cast myself into this 
figure; now he comes violently on, and withal advancing his rapier 
to strike, I thought to have took his arm, for he had left his whole 
body to my election, and I was sure he could not recover his guard. 
Sir, I missed my purpose in his arm, rashed his doublet-sleeve, ran him 
close by the left cheek, and through his hair. He again lights me here, 
. — I had on a gold cable hatband, then new come up, which I wore 
about a murrey French hat I had, — cuts my hatband, and yet it 
was massy goldsmith's work, cuts my brims, which, by good for- 
tune, being thick embroidered with gold twist and spangles, dis- 
appointed the force of the blow: nevertheless, it grazed on my shoul- 
der, takes me away six purls of an Italian cut-work band I wore, cost 
me three pound in the Exchange but three days before. 

Punt. This was a strange encounter. 

Fast. Nay, you shall hear, sir: with this we both fell out and 
'oreathed. Now, upon the second sign of his assault, I betook me to 
the former manner of my defence; he, on the other side, abandoned 
his body to the same danger as before, and follows me still with 
blows: but I being loth to take the deadly advantage that lay before 
me of his left side, made a kind of stramazoun, ran him up to the hilts 
through the doublet, through the shirt, and yet missed the skin. 



238 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

He, making a reverse blow, falls upon my embossed girdle — I had 
thrown off the hangers before, — strikes off a skirt of a thick-laced 
satin doublet I had, lined with some four taffetas, cuts off two panes 
embroidered with pearl, rends through the drawings-out of tissue, 
enters the linings, and skips the flesh. 

Car. I wonder he speaks not of his wrought shirt. 

Fast. Here, in the opinion of mutual damage, we paused; but 
ere I proceed I must tell you, segnior, that in this last encounter not 
having leisure to put off my silver spurs, one of the rowels catched 
hold of the ruffle of my boot, and being Spanish leather and subject 
to tear, overthrows me, rends me two pair of silk stockings that I 
put on, being somewhat a raw morning, a peach color and another, 
and strikes me some half-inch deep into the side of the calf; he, see- 
ing the blood come, presently takes horse and away; I, having bound 
up my wound with a piece of my wrought shirt — 

Car. O! comes it in there f 

Fast. Rid after him, and, lighting at the court gate, both to- 
gether embraced, and marched hand in hand up into the presence. 
Was not this business well carried ? 

A natural question arises here: where M^as Shakespeare 
during all this fuss and fury f especially as we know by a clear 
passage in Hamlet that he was neither ignorant of the matter 
nor without an opinion about it. There is moreover an allu- 
sion to the quarrel in an academic play called The Return 
from Parnassus in which Shakespeare is not only suggested 
as having taken a part in the quarrel but is spoken of as having 
gained the better of Jonson in it. Still further, some have 
thought that Troilus and Cressida, from its bitter and satirical 
spirit (so unlike the Shakespeare of earlier and later work) was 
the particular play in which the great dramatist took his part 
in these petty broils. However, in view of the circumstance 
that Dekker's Satiromastix was acted by Shakespeare's 
company in answer to Jonson's two satires, just performed by 
the Children of the Chapel, it seems not impossible to suppose 
this play, rather than Troilus, the one in which Shakespeare 
triumphed, vicariously to be sure, over the satire of the trucu- 
lent Jonson. The passage in Hamlet referring to "the war" 
and constantly quoted, runs as follows. Hamlet has heard of 
the arrival of players at Elsinore and is in conversation with 



SHAKESPEARE AND THE "WAR" 239 

Rosencrantz about them. He asks: "What players are 
they?" And Rosencrantz repUes: 

Even those you were wont to take delight in, the tragedians of 
the city. 

Ham. How chances it they travel ? Their residence, both in 
reputation and profit, was better both ways. 

Ros. I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late 
innovation. 

Ham. Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in 
the city ? Are they so followed ? 

Ros. No, indeed they are not. 

Ham. How comes it ? Do they grow rusty ? 

Ros. Nay, their endeavor keeps in the wonted pace: but there is, 
sir, an aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, 
and are most tyrannically clapped for 't: these are now in fashion, 
and so berattle the common stages, — so they call them, — that 
many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce 
come hither. 

Ham. What! are they children ? who maintains 'em ? how are 
they escoted ? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can 
sing ? will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves 
to common players, — as it is most like, if their means are no better, 
— their writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim against their 
. own succession ? 

Ros. Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; and the 
nation holds it no sin to tarre them to controversy: there was, for a 
while, no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player 
went to cuffs in the question. 

Hamlet learns that the regular troupes of the city have suf- 
fered what amounts to an inhibition or order to cease playing, 
because of the extraordinary popularity of an aery of chil- 
dren, that is company of boy actors, who are tremendously ap- 
plauded by the public for performing satirical plays in which 
people are lampooned on the boards. And Hamlet's question 
— that is, Shakespeare's — is not. Who are the parties to the 
quarrel ? or, How cleverly have the poets lashed each other ? 
His thought is for the little actors, and the pity that they should 
thus be "tarred," or set on, to tear and worry, in such a rivalry, 
their older fellows in the profession, when it is likely that they, 



240 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

in time, must succeed the very men they are now attack- 
ing. It may be questioned if Shakespeare's personal contri- 
bution to the war of the theaters was more than this kindly 
admonition. 

Even a cursory examination of Elizabethan plays discovers 
them occurring as to kind and subject in groups wherein some 
popular success is emulated by rival dramatists and the same 
or like topic exploited until the public calls for something new. 
Subjects derived from classical history or myth had been pop- 
ular on the stage almost from the beginning. The direct 
suggestion came from Seneca; and from Sackville to Kyd the 
academic Senecan line was continued, by Daniel, Greville, 
and the coterie that preserved the traditions of Sidney, to Sir 
William Alexander and his Monarchic Tragedies, in the early 
years of King James. Except for Daniel's Cleopatra and 
Philotas, both of them graceful and dignified tragedies, none 
of these plays were intended for the stage. The whole group 
appears to have been influenced directly by the French Sen- 
ecan, Robert Garnier, and the best of them are the remarkable 
closet dramas, Alaham and Mustapha, strange yet attractive 
product of the philosophic ponderings of Sir Fulke Greville, 
written perhaps before the death of Elizabeth. On the pop- 
ular stage, aside from such old productions as Lodge's Wounds 
of Civil War and the anonymous Wars of Cyrus, which date 
about the time of the Armada, Marlowe's Dido, Queen of 
Carthage, printed in 1 594, was one of the more important 
dramas levying on classical subjects, a tragedy in which Nash 
is alleged to have had a hand and one which, while far from 
ranking with Marlowe's greatest work, is no discredit to either 
author. A year or two later came Heywood's mythology 
dramatized in the sundry plays on the four ages, already men- 
tioned; and about 1600, Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar. 

It has been observed that Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar is 
one of the most regularly constructed of his plays. In it he 
seems to have caught more nearly than elsewhere the restraint 
of the classical spirit, though great as this tragedy is and full 
of the poetry, the wisdom, and the power of characterization 
that mark Shakespeare's plays everywhere more or less, Julius 



JONSON IN TRAGEDY 241 

Ccesar can not be declared, from the antiquarian's point of 
view, an accurate or an informing picture of ancient Roman' 
life and history. Scholar and antiquarian that he was, the 
faults of such a production must have impressed themselves 
on a man like Jonson; and his Sejanus, first acted in 1603, 
was, if not exactly a reply, at least an expression of his own 
position. It seems from words of Jonson on the publication 
of Sejanus two years later that he had had in its first version 
a collaborator. And he is careful to have the reader know 
that, in printing, he has "rather chosen to put weaker and, no 
doubt, less pleasing [work] of mine own, than to defraud so 
happy a genius of his right by my loathed usurpation." Some 
have thought the "second pen" Shakespeare's. At any rate 
we know from Jonson's folio that Shakespeare was one of 
"the principal actors" in Sejanus and that, whatever its exact 
circumstances, the rivalry of these great spirits could not have 
been other than a generous one. In this tragedy of Sejanus, 
as to a lesser degree in his other tragedy dealing with classical 
history, Catiline, his Conspiracy, Jonson shows himself true 
to the classical ideals and theories that had always animated 
him. The earlier play was printed with elaborate scholarly 
references to authorities used in working up his material. The 
poet was not unjustly criticized for this ^^edantry, Marston 
slyly remarking in the preface to his Sophonisha (another able 
tragedy of this general type), that "to transcribe authors, 
quote authorities, and translate Latin prose orations into Eng- 
lish blank-verse, hath, in this subject, been the least aim of my 
studies." Sejanus, with its admirable portrait study of Ti- 
berius, derived from Tacitus, and Catiline, using as Jonson 
does in it the materials of Sallust's succinct account of that 
conspiracy, are splendid examples of Jonson's power prac- 
tically to apply his just and reasonable classical theories about 
tragedy and literary art to current EngHsh conditions. It is 
not enough to say that if Jonson's figures are the truer Romans, 
Shakespeare's are the truer men. The art of the two is less 
opposed than to be contrasted. To the academician the free 
art of genius must always seem amazing and inexplicable, as 
it remains for any rules that he can apply. But the art of the 



242 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

academician has its place and deserves its praise. It is a credit 
to these men of natures so diverse that they should have es- 
teemed each other and worked thus together to produce an 
artistic result. And it is an equal credit to the age that it 
appreciated both, although it made Jonson honored and famous 
and added riches only to the more popular success of Shake- 
speare. 

In 1605 Jonson produced, with the help of Chapman and 
Marston, to whom he was now fully reconciled, one of the best 
comedies of London life in the language. This was Eastward 
Hoe, a vivid picture of the tradesman's life presented in the 
eternal contrast of the good and the evil-lived apprentice. 
Here the authors succeeded in hitting the happy mean be- 
tween purposeless art and moralizing, even though this comedy 
does mark the climax of the parable of the prodigal son in 
English drama. Neither preaching, allegory, nor abstraction 
enter into this comedy to mar its effect; and yet its personages 
are sufficiently typical to have appealed to its citizen au- 
ditors as they appeal for their truth, humor, and vivacity to the 
reader to-day. The play, too, is so well knit and its plan is 
so logically carried out that it is impossible to determine the 
conditions of this fortunate collaboration. A passage con- 
taining satirical allusions to the Scotch was excised by order 
of the royal council; but as passages were retained reflecting 
on the country of the king's birth, Jonson and Chapman were 
arrested and sent to prison for a time. In consequence of this 
and of the popularity of Eastward Hoe on the stage, it was 
printed three times in the year of its first presentation. 

Volpone, often regarded as the most characteristic of the 
comedies of Jonson, was acted for the first time in 1606 It 
marks in tone a transition from the dramatic satires to the purer 
comedies of contemporary life that follow a year or so later. 
Fo//>on/iOKe story of a Venetian grandee and his servant 
Mosca, two scoundrels without a redeeming trait. They are 
surrounded by a group of parasites and self-seekers whose 
discomfiture at the hands of cleverer rascals than themselves, 
with the final overthrow of these two, alone justifies the ethics 
of the play. The cynical tone of Volpone and its attitude of 



JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE 243 

doubt as to the existence of virtue in the world raise the ques- 
tion as to whether such a play is comedy at all. Indeed, its 
method and tone are wholly tragic, although imprisonment, 
not death, overtakes the evil-doers. Jonson's view of comedy 
was derived from the ancients. To him the proper material 
for comedy is to be found in those departures from ordinary 
conditions, whether moral, social, or other, that rouse the 
phlegm of the satirist and moralist. The world to Jonson 
was made up for the most part of two classes, the fools and the 
knaves. And fools have been fair game for the knave time 
out of mind. There is such a thing, to be sure, as virtue; but 
unaccompanied by the protection of brains, it is likely to be 
little better than folly. Jonson_ca.n forgive any^^ 
stupidity; and hence, Surley, the only respectable man in The 
Alchemist is discomfited, and that graceless scamp. Face, for- 
given for his wit and success. It is somewhat strange that a 
man like Jonson, whose whole nature was grounded in a rig- 
orous conception of moral ideas, should thus fail where Shake- 
speare and Dekker, careless observers of life as it is, succeed 
by an unerring instinct. But Shakespeare's appeal is almost 
always to the heart; Jonson's to the head and the critical 
understanding... Shakespeare's plots are made up of events 
generally beyond the control or even guidance of those whom 
they concern; and they involve in consequence an ebb and 
flow of passion with a resulting development or degeneracy 
in character. Jonson's plots on the contrary are a fabric of 
contrivances and devices, controlled by the cleverness and in- 
genuity of the characters of the play. In place of an ebb and 
flow of emotion, we have a struggle of wit, a play of mind 
against mind; and the characteristics of a personage once 
determined, he remains the same to the end. 

After Volpone, Jonson gave up foreign scene for comedy. 
He even transferred the locale of Every Man in his Humor, 
in his revision of that play for his folio, from Florence to Lon- 
don, transforming Signior Lorenzo di Pazzi to Old Know'ell, 
Prospero to Master Welborn, Biancha to Mistress Bridget 
and Hesperida to Dame Kitely, dwelling "i' the Old Jewry." 
The Silent Woman and The Alchemist, 1609 and 16 1 0, with 



244 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

Bartholomew Fair, 1614, represent Jonson at his very best in 
comedies of the life of his native town. Jonson knew his 
London as well as his namesake, Dr. Johnson, in the age of 
the Georges; for satirist and moralist that the elder author 
was, he never forgot that the material for the drama is obtained 
primarily in the actual characteristics of people about you. 
The Alchemist details the doings of three sharpers who set up 
in a house, vacated for the time by reason of the plague, an 
alchemical furnace and by this and other means fool and cheat 
as many gulls as they can decoy thither. Their victims are, 
for the most part, contributary to their own undoing by their 
folly and wickedness and, in the denouement. Face, the clever 
servant, prime mover of all villainy, is forgiven and a widow 
married out of hand after a manner known only to Roman 
comedy. The Silent fVoman turns on the trick of Delphine, 
a knavish nephew, to regain his position as heir to his uncle, 
in the process of which his uncle, who detests noise, is driven 
almost frantic and a marriage (that he has planned to dis- 
inherit his nephew) is frustrated by the discovery that the wife 
is neither "silent" nor a woman, but an exceedingly noisy boy. 
Even slighter is the general fabric of the visit of Zeal-in-the- 
Land Busy, immortal Puritan, with his companions, to Bar- 
tholomew Fair, with the adventures that there befell them. 
Yet for clever plotting, for ingenuity of situation, sustained 
wit of dialogue, and humor in the conception of character 
and incident these comedies of Jonson have never been sur- 
passed. Their age acclaimed them and imitated them again 
and again; and they held the stage as long as the comedies 
of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and after. 

The rest of the plays of Jonson, except for a comedy called 
The Devil is an Ass, that failed on the stage in the year of 
Shakespeare's death, were not written until after the accession 
of King Charles in 1625. They were called by Dryden "Jon- 
son's dotages," which is not fair; none the less The Staple of 
News, The New Inn, and The Magnetic Lady are certainly 
vastly inferior to his dramatic satires, his comedies, or the two 
Roman tragedies. But, great as was Jonson's activity in the 



THE POETRY OF JONSON 245 

composition of his score of originally devised and closely 
written dramas for the popular stage, this represents only one 
side of his busy career. Of his masques, their inventiveness 
and poetic beauty, we must write in a later chapter. He was 
the acknowledged leader, as poet laureate, of those who found 
their livelihood in entertaining the court of King James. And 
this primacy of his extended into the next reign. In criticism, 
Jonson was easily the first, and what he taught by precept he 
exemplified in a wide and various practice. Jonson's non- 
dramatic poetry includes lyrics, among them a few sonnets 
(though he did not love the form), satirical verse, chiefly in the 
shape of epigrams and mock poems, and a large amount of 
occasional verse for the most part made up of epistles, epitaphs, 
and dedicatory poems; for Jonson was on terms of intimacy 
with all the authors and half the nobility of his time. The 
author grouped these works under the headings Epigrams and 
The Forest and published both in the folio of 1616 to which 
he gave his careful personal attention. A third group (of mis- 
cellaneous poems) doubtless also of his making, appears in 
print for the first time in the posthumous second volume of his 
collected works, bearing date 1640, and is there designated 
Underwoods. 

In turning to the non-dramatic poetry of Jonson, especially 
to his lyrical poetry, the first thing that we note is a sense of 
form, not merely detail and transition, like the "links, bright 
and even" of The Faery Queen, but a sense of the entire poem 
in its relation to its parts. This sense involves brevity and 
condensity of expression, a feeling on the part of the poet that 
the effect may be spoiled by a word too much, a feeling notably 
in contrast with the diff"useness, the continuousness and want 
of concentration characteristic of the Spenserian mode of the 
day. Jonson is writing in courtly compliment to his patroness 
Lucy, Countess of Bedford : 

This morning timely rapt with holy fire, 
I thought to form unto my zealous Muse, 
What kind of creature I should most desire, 
To honor, serve, and love, as\ poets use. 



246 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

I meant to make her fair, and free, and wise, 
Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great; 
I meant the day-star should not brighter rise, 
Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat. 
I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet, 
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride; 
I meant each softest virtue there should meet. 
Fit in that softer bosom to reside. 
Only a learned and a manly soul 
I purposed her; that should, with even powers, 
I The rock, the spindle, and the shears control 

i Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours. 

Such when I meant to feign and wished to see, 
My Muse bade Bedford write, and that was she. 

About such poetry as this there is a sense of finish rather 
than of elaboration. It is less continuous than coinplete; 
more concentrated, less diffuse; chaste rather than florid; 
controlled, and yet not always less spontaneous; reserved, 
and yet not alw^ays less natural. There are other things in 
the Jonsonian manner. It retained classical allusion less for 
the sake of embellishment than as an atmosphere — to borrow 
a term from the nomenclature of art. Its drafts on ancient 
mythology become allusive, and the effects produced by Hor- 
ace, Catullus, or Anacreon are essayed in reproduction under 
English conditions. Not less eager in the pursuit of beauty 
than the Spenserian, the manner of Jonson seeks to realize 
her perfections by means of constructive excellence, not by 
entranced passion. It concerns itself with choiceness of 
diction, selectiveness in style, with the repression of wandering 
ideas and loosely conceived figures, — in a word, the manner of 
Jonson involves classicality. Sidney's return to the ancients 
has been called empirical; the classicism of Jonson may be 
termed assimilative. 

It is thus that Jonson turns a lyric: 

Still to be neat, still to be drest, 
As you were going to a feast; 
Still to be powdered, still perfumed: 
Lady, it is to be presumed, 



THE POETRY OF JONSON 247 

Though art's hid causes are not found, 
All is not sweet, all is not sound. 

Give me a look, give me a face. 

That makes simplicity a grace; 

Robes loosely flowing, hair as free: 

Such sweet neglect more taketh me 

Than all th' adulteries of art; 

They strike mine eyes, but not my heart. 

And in this wise he fashions two stanzas of an "Ode," one of 
the noblest of his many fine poems addressed to his notable 
friends of the day: 

He stood a soldier to the last right end, 
A perfect patriot and a noble friend. 
But most a virtuous son. 
All offices were done 
By him so ample, full, and round. 
In weight, in measure, number, sound. 
As, though his age imperfect might appear. 
His life was of humanity the sphere. 

It is not growing like a tree 

In bulk, doth make men better be; 
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, 
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear: 
A lily of a day 
Is fairer far in May, 

Although it fall and die that night; 

It was the plant and flower of light. 
In small proportions we just beauties see; 
And in short measures life may perfect be. 

Ill griQmic-tlionght and moralizing, such as this or the noble 
Epode beginning, "Not to know vice at all," we have Jonson 
lyrically at his best, if such passages be strictly lyrical and not 
rather epigrammatic in the larger classical sense. The Epi- 
grams of Jonson are full of cleverness and agile wit, and several 
playful poems, such as "A Fit of Rime against Rime" or 
"The Execration against Vulcan," are possessed of a light- 
someness and raillery, as his epitaphs declare a humane tender- 



248 THE CLASSICAL REACTION 

ness, such as we could hardly expect of the trenchant author 
of Poetaster. 

We have seen how classical were Jonson's ideas as to the 
drama. This was only the most conspicuous example of the 
wider tenets that he held concerning literature at large. From 
his works and especially from his avowed opinions, expressed 
in his Conversations with Drummond and carefully noted 
down by that poet at the time, we learn that Jonson believed 
in the criticism of Horace and in the rhetoric of Quintilian; 
in the sanction of classical usage for history, oratory, and 
poetry; and that an English ode should be modeled faith- 
fully on the structural niceties of Pindar. Despite all this, 
Jonson's theories about literature were not only, in the main, 
reasonable and consistent, they were often surprisingly liberal. 
Thus he could laugh, as he did, in a well-known passage of 
the prologue to Every Man in his Humor, at the absurdities 
of contemporary stage realism which, 

with three rusty swords, 
And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words, 
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars; 
And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars; 

and yet declare, as to that fetish of the supine classicist, the 
three unities, that "we [English playwrights] should enjoy 
the same licence or free power to illustrate and heighten our 
invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those 
strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are 
nothing but form, would thrust upon us." He could affirm 
that "Spenser's stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter"; and 
yet tell Drummond that "for a heroic poem there was no such 
ground as King Arthur's fiction." He censured the pastoral- 
ists for their unreality, and yet he had by heart passages of the 
Shepherds' Calendar and showed how he thought that a true 
pastoral drama should be written in the Sad Shepherd; he 
mocked the sonneteers, especially Daniel, in his satirical plays, 
for their sugared sweetness and frivolity; but wrote himself 
some of the finest lyrics of his age. The catholicity of Jonson's 
taste in its sympathy included the philosophy and eloquence 



JONSON THE CLASSICIST 249 

of Lord Bacon, the divinity of Hooker, the historical and anti- 
quarian inquiries of Camden and Selden, the classical scholar- 
ship of Chapman, and the poetry of such diverse men as 
Spenser, Father Southv^rell, Donne, Sandys, Herrick, Carew, 
and his lesser "sons." 

With consistent theories such as these applied with liber- 
ality, with catholicity of taste, and the force of a strong and 
confident nature such as was his, we can not wonder at Jon- 
son's influence on his time, the more particularly that the wild 
and inconsiderate spirit of much Elizabethan poetry laid itself 
only too readily open to criticism for its amateurishness and 
apparent want of any serious purpose in art. Further into 
the qualities that distinguish Jonson as a classicist — his 
habitual practice of occasional verse, his trend towards a pre- 
cise, pointed, and antithetical diction, his Latinized vocab- 
ulary, and his preference for the decasyllablic couplet over all 
other kinds of verse, we need not look further here. To Jon- 
son must be granted the credit of setting a standard of literary 
excellence, not recognized before his time; and of assuming, 
in so doing, an attitude of independence towards the public. 
Jonson developed the masque, as we shall see, and devised a 
species of Roman tragedy, conceived historically and freed 
alike from the restrictions of Senecan models and the improb- 
abilities of romantic treatment. He added the comedy of 
humors to the forms of the English drama. And it was this 
satirically heightened picture of contemporary life, handled 
with a restraint and finish ultimately traceable to classical 
example, that survived on the stage after the Restoration in 
the comedies of Davenant, Dryden, Etheridge and Vanbrugh. 
Thus it was that Jonson gave to the later drama one of its two 
permanent types; and, displaying the tastes and ideals that 
came, in still more restricted form, to rule English literature 
in the age of Dryden and Pope, set the channel in which Eng- 
lish poetry was to run for three generations as the founder of 
what is known as the classical school of English poetry. 



CHAPTER XIV 

SHAKESPEARE, WEBSTER, AND THE HEYDAY 
OF ROMANTIC TRAGEDY 

THE range and variety of Elizabethan tragedy is almost 
that of the entire drama itself; for religious, historical, 
and classical subjects, all find place among the tragic plays 
of the age, as well as the romantic biography and fiction that 
are levied on as their more usual sources. In previous pages 
of this book the beginnings of tragedy have been traced from 
its earliest examples in regular form, derived as they w^ere 
from Seneca, to its realization in The Spanish Tragedy and 
in the greater v^^orks of Marlowe. The murder play, too, 
has been described; and its cruelty and crass realism found 
to have developed in Arden of Feversham into one example, at 
least, deserving a place beside the triumphs of contrasted 
romantic art. But these were not all the varieties of earlier 
Elizabethan tragedy; even the chronicle play, epic and often 
dramatically formless that it was, developed in the hands of 
Marlowe and Shakespeare into tragedy of a; higer type and 
rose, in Edward II, in Richard II, and elsewhere, to a place 
beside romantic tragedy at its best. 

There is no one influence in English tragedy so abiding 
and pervasive as that of the Roman poet Seneca. Without 
lepeating what has already been suggested, it may be remarked 
that the early selection of Seneca, rather than the superior 
examples of ancient tragedy which ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and 
Euripides offer, was due to several considerations. First, 
Seneca was nearer to hand and he wrote in Latin, the universal 
language of the learning and diplomacy of the age. Secondly, 
Seneca's moral purpose, or at least his love of gnomic moral- 
izing and putting the commonplace of obvious comment into 
the mouths of his personages, fell in well with the ideas of a 
time that had not yet learned to accept poetry and the drama 
as things properly existent without an ulterior moral end. 

250 



"TITUS ANDRONICUS" 251 

Lastly, Seneca was the most modern of the ancients and the 
most romantic of the classics; and his blood and revenge, 
his ghosts, furies, and horrors, were dear to an age which, how- 
ever nice its appreciation of the more spiritual qualities of art, 
clung none the less to the robust, the virile, and the actual 
fiquite as tenaciously as the times that went before and those 
that have come after. 

The earliest influences on Shakespeare in tragedy were 
those of Kyd and Marlowe. We may not like to think of 
Shakespeare as the author or even the reviser of Titus An- 
dronicus; for the subject is horrible, the treatment often 
uninspired and blatant. But this tragedy is neither wanting 
in promise nor devoid of many touches that suggest the hand 
and heart of Shakespeare. If we are to seek for any solution 
of the enigma of Shakespeare's genius, we must expect just 
such crudity, such unawakened sensibilities, such want of 
taste as we find in Titus of the inexperienced Stratford lad. 
Titus Andronicus is precisely the kind of a play that a young 
dramatist of talent might write in his imitative period, over- 
doing the lust, the cruelty, and the blood of his subject in his 
endeavor to succeed, and from the very circumstance that these 
things were so remote from his own intellectual preoccupa- 
tions. That the style and the manner of Greene, Peele, Kyd, 
and other authors have been found in it scarcely weakens the 
probability of its writing by Shakespeare; and the circumstance 
that the subject was popular (recurring in Henslowe under 
variations of title in 159 1 and 1593, in a German version 
derived from a contemporary English play, and later in a 
Dutch version) merely adds to the likelihood of Shakespeare's 
choice of it. Titus is a horrible and tasteless tragedy, showing 
none the less in the quality of its diction and in its powerful 
conception of such personages as Aaron and Tamora unusual 
dramatic promise. 

Titus must certainly have been on the stage before 1594, 
in February of which year the recently rediscovered first 
quarto was registered for publication.^ Romeo and Juliet, 

^ The only exemplar of this quarto was discovered among the 
books of a Swedish gentleman of Scottish descent, name*! Robson, 
at Lund, Sweden, in 1905. 



252 



THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 



whether dated back to 1591 or left at 1596 or 1597, must not 
only have followed Titus, but, if taste, growth of power and 
restraint, and grasp of dramatic situation mean anything, 
some time must have elapsed between the two tragedies. 
Whatever Shakespeare's actual source for Romeo and 'Juliet, 
the subject had long been popular on the stage and in current 
poetry and fiction; so that here, as so often, Shakespeare 
becomes the artistic form-giver to a theme already well known 
and accepted. Inevitable tragedy though it is, Romeo and 
Juliet is written in the exuberant and poetical spirit that ani- 
mates A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Merchant of 
Venice; and youthful and untamed though this spirit is, we 
have in it abundant promise of much that was to come. In 
this great tragedy of adolescence, especially as we compare it 
with other examples of plays the theme of which is love, we 
are struck by Shakespeare's naturalness, the simple adequacy 
of his art, the poetry and clearness of his picture of human 
passion, and the genial play of his humor about a theme easily 
capable of degeneration into sentimentality in the hands of a 
less skilful artist. In Juliet we have for the first time to the 
full Shakespeare's unparalleled insight into womanhood and 
his recognition of the glory of her love. The true theme is 
Juliet's passion; Romeo's is paltry in comparison. Love 
clears Juliet's vision as to all things and, left to her pru- 
dence, her daring, her devotion, all had gone well. It is 
Romeo's eyes that are blind, and it is he that plunges distracted 
to the catastrophe. 

By the time that Shakespeare again turned his attention 
to tragedy, he had completed, save for Henry VIII, his list 
of chronicle plays and now chose a subject from ancient history 
in a sense kindred to them. The Tragedy of Julius Ccesar 
has been variously placed as to date of composition between 
1599 and 1 601. Whether he used some now lost play or not, 
the dramatist's immediate source was the latter part of North's 
Plutarch, which alone accounts for the unheroic character 
given to the dictator, as Caesar's greatness and his exploits 
belong to his earlier career. The play, indeed, is less the 
tragedy of Caesar than that of Brutus, whom Shakespeare did 



SHAKESPEARE AND JONSON 253 

not hesitate to present in a light far more favorable to his 
honesty, his disinterestedness, and kindness of heart than 
appears in the pages of Plutarch. In choosing thus the story 
of the fall of the greatest man of antiquity Shakespeare was 
attempting nothing novel. The subject had been treated on 
the stage by Gosson, by henchmen of Henslowe more than 
once, and at Oxford; and the source had been long since 
broached for other purposes, by Lodge for example in his 
Wounds of Civil War, as far back as 1588. The suggestion 
of a regulative example in Jonson for this play of Shakespeare's 
on Julius Caesar has been made above. But it must be remem- 
bered that Jonson's own labors in this kind followed Shake- 
speare's tragedy. Whatever their relation, nothing could be 
greater than their contrast, for in Shakespeare the dramatist 
ruled, in Jonson the scholar. Neither of these great authors 
treated ancient history after the melodramatic manner of 
Seneca, for even Jonson, with all his veneration of the an- 
cients, never tied — save in the fiction of text-books — to the 
strict laws that governed their art. But Jonson was solicitous 
of historical, biographical, and archaeological truth. Hence 
he studied his originals with care and followed them with the 
scholar's fidelity. Shakespeare sought for a higher truth 
than these; and as artistic truth — not historical, biographi- 
cal, or archaeologic — is the truth of the drama, his work 
abides the touch of time as Jonson's never could. Shake- 
speare's Julius C(Bsar, which was an immediate success, 
revived an interest in classical topics and not only did Jonson's 
Sejanus follow in 1603, but Marston's Sophonisha, Heywood's 
Rape of Lucrece, and Gwinne's Latin tragedy AT^ro, all belong 
to the same year. The first of these is a romantic drama of 
conglomerate type of no small merit; Heywood's play adds 
little to his credit; Dr. Matthew Gwinne's Nero is an ambi- 
tious work dedicated to the queen and true to all the theories 
cherished by Jonson. 

Although Shakespeare turned to subjects for tragedy more 
truly romantic in the interim, he was drawn into other plays 
of this type a few years later by a second revival of interest in 
ancient story. To the year 1607 belong two plays on Caesar 



254 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

and Pompey, the one anonymous, the other by Chapman, and 
likewise an English college play on Nero. And this year, or 
one or two thereafter, saw Timon of Athens, Antony and 
Cleopatra, Pericles, and Coriolanus as well. These plays 
group naturally together from their setting in ancient times. 
Their general source (save for Pericles) is Plutrach's Lives. 
But they differ widely in their minor sources, in the terms of 
their authorship, and in their relative qualities and excellence. 
Pericles is a romance of adventure and belongs elsewhere. 
Timon, even more than Pericles, is a work of great inequality 
and inconceivable as wholly from the hand of Shakespeare. 
In this story of hopeless misanthropy the dialogue of Lucian 
concerning Timon, and perhaps an earlier academic play, 
may have served for suggestions. It has even been doubted 
whether Timon of Athens was ever staged, and its place in the 
folio and the corruption of the text in places cast further sus- 
picion upon it. With Antony and Cleopatra and with Corio- 
lanus we are on firmer ground. The latter, on the stage by 
1609, is a clearly conceived tragedy turning on a definite 
theme, the arrogant pride of Coriolanus, and developed with 
an artist's sense of the effectiveness of a single tone. It adds 
to our appreciation of this emphasis of effect to learn that 
the characteristics of Coriolanus are merely suggested in Plu- 
tarch's narrative. Shakespeare's misinterpretation of history 
in making "the dignified secession of the plebs" a turbulent 
mob, is thus justified by the dramatic demands of his subject 
as he conceives it. It is difficult to sympathize with the criti- 
cism that objects to Shakespeare's contemptuous representa- 
tion of the mob in this tragedy and in Julius Ccesar. The 
drift and average of mankind in leaderless fluxion has always 
been fickle, stupid, and disorderly; and it requires more than 
seeing things as they are to wax eloquent on the virtues and 
prudence of men when they herd in the streets. Shakespeare, 
though country born, saw countrymen, rustic and the popu- 
lace of London, ignorant and uncleanly; and he sacrificed no 
jot or tittle of the concrete truth to lofty generalizations on 
that figment of the imagination, the average man. 

Just as we found Shakespeare raising the chronicle history 



"ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA" 255 

out of its species into a tragedy of world significance, so in 
this matter of ancient history he rises above the trammels of 
his sources in Julius CcBsar and in Antony and Cleopatra. 
This last remarkable tragedy is less an historical drama on 
the days of ancient Rome than a glorification of the time-worn 
fable which has converted the infatuation of an elderly de- 
bauchee for a royal light-o'-love into one of the supreme love 
stories of all time. In Shakespeare's hands Cleopatra holds 
our sympathy and, what is more, our respect. It is only 
necessary to compare this impetuous, variable, and fascinating 
serpent of the Nile with the Senecan frigidity of Daniel's 
picture of the Egyptian queen in his Cleopatra, 1593, or the 
painted meretrix that Fletcher later made of her in The False 
One, to realize to the full the strength of Shakespeare's por- 
trait. Dryden, too, attempted a dramatic portrait of Cleo- 
patra in his All for Love; and in emulating Shakespeare, sur- 
passed himself; but he did no more. Depth, fullness of thought 
and impetuous imagery, all are qualities of Shakespeare's 
Antony and Cleopatra and it matters little that the scene is 
changed at will (fifteen times in the fourth act) and that con- 
structively the drama straggles almost to the degree of a 
chronicle play. Julius Ccesar and Coriolanus are better con- 
structed tragedies; but Shakespeare is seldom at his best 
under restraint and there is a larger utterance, a wider horizon 
in Antony and Cleopatra than in these earlier tragedies deal- 
ing with classical story. 

In our endeavor to keep the tragedies of similar subject 
together we have advanced beyond the heyday of romantic 
tragedy. Let us return to the later years of Queen Elizabeth 
and to another topic. When Marlowe died he left behind 
him a play called The Massacre at Paris in which the conse- 
quences, rather than the terrible event, of the massacre of St. 
Bartholomew are set forth for the stage, and the Duke of 
Guise is gibbeted as a monster of wickedness. This lead, 
thus apparently for the first time pointed out. Chapman 
followed in some five dramas of tragic import and, although 
unequal, of a very real merit. Of Chapman we shall hear 
more fully in the next chapter when we reach a considera- 



256 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

tion of his famous translation of Homer. For the present 
it is enough to recall that Chapman's beginnings as a drama- 
tist date at least as far back as those of Jonson and that his 
earliest plays were comedies of disguse, intrigue, and humors 
in the Jonsonian sense. In 1607 Bussy D'Amhois was 
printed for the first time, though certainly much earlier 
written. This tragedy tells the story of an impoverished 
bravo who became a favorite of Henry HI, and sets 
forth at large the tangled intrigues and dissolute life of the 
court of that despicable monarch. This play was doubtless 
written far earlier, if it does not link even more closely on to 
The Massacre at Paris and The Civil Wars in France, three 
plays of 1598 by Dekker and others, long since lost. In 1604 
Chapman wrote and staged, under influence of the popularity 
of the tragedy of revenge, a continuation of Bussy, entitled 
The Revenge of Bussy D'Amhois, wherein that worthy's 
brother Cleremont, "a Senecal man," as the author calls him, 
of misanthropic Hamlet type, figures as hero and avenger. 
Four years later appeared a more extensive work. The Con- 
spiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, a drama in two 
parts, on French history almost contemporary. On complaint 
of the French ambassador that his royal master was represented 
on the stage in this production, the performance of it was 
stopped, and the author driven into hiding to escape arrest. 
When all was done. Chapman failed to secure permission to 
publish his work in its completeness, and it remains, a testi- 
mony of the efficacy of the censorship of its day. Byron's 
story is that of the treason of an arrogant and self-sufficient 
noble, whose contumacy when the royal clemency is offered 
him brings about his deserved fall. Chabot, Admiral of 
France, licensed only in the reign of King Charles, is the fifth 
of these French histories of Chapman; and though by far the 
best as a play, from its revision if not complete rewriting by 
Shirley, is beyond the range of our period. In the other four 
plays we have the most characteristic contribution of Chap- 
man to the drama of his time. These French histories are 
full of poetry, thought, and a certain power of moralizing in 
verse for which their author is justly memorable. But they 



FOREIGN HISTORIES 257 

are, save for Chabot, formless and chaotic; though it is re- 
markable that Chapman's personages are none the less dis- 
coverable in so much detail and stand out often so dinstinctly. 
In these dramas, as in nearly everything he wrote, we feel 
that Chapman strives too hard. Ease and naturalness he 
seems never to have compassed; all is effort and strenuous 
endeavor, with not quite complete success. These were by 
no means the only plays levying on foreign contemporary 
history and after Shakespeare's death came several such, as 
Fletcher's Barnavelt, The Noble Spanish Soldier by Dekker, 
and William Rowley and Middleton's Game at Chess, which 
were close upon the heels of the events that they depict. A 
background of French "history" serves for two early anony- 
mous romantic dramas, The Trial of Chivalry, 1597, and 
The Weakest Goeth to the Wall, i6oo; the Faust-like bio- 
graphical Tragedy of Pope Alexander, i6o6, by the lyric poet 
Barnabe Barnes, is one of many quasi-historical tragedies of 
Italian scene. Other plays, such as A Larumfor London, 1602, 
and The Hector of Germany, 16 1 5, lay their scene in the last- 
named country. Among them is Alphonsus of Germany, an 
historical tragedy of no little force, of doubtful date, and even 
more doubtfully attributed by some to Chapman. 

Let us turn back to our point of departure once more. 
Few plays enjoyed the popularity of The Spanish Tragedy, 
and few begot as time went on so large and vigorous a progeny. 
This popular work of Kyd is a tragedy of revenge and we have 
seen above how closely its story parallels that of Hamlet, an 
early version of which may be confidently attributed to Kyd 
also. It was in 1599 that young John Marston, fresh from 
the university and from penning sundry satires and unre- 
strained erotic poems, placed on the stage his Antonio and 
Melltda and Antonio's Revenge, two dramas of vital if unequal 
power and promise. The former is a serious drama, arrested 
just short of tragedy; the latter a tragedy of revenge following 
closely the method and even the details of The Spanish 
Tragedy and Hamlet. Thus Antonio's revenge is for a father 
slain, that vengeance is invoked by his father's ghost, Antonio 
is driven nearly mad by his grief and horror, and hesitates to 



258 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

kill his enemy, as does Hamlet, when in his power; while, as 
in The Spanish Tragedy, the catastrophe is brought about by 
a play within a play. But Antonio's Revenge is no mere 
copy; it is full of real and original horrors of its own and, with 
all its stridency and melodrama, an effective piece of work. 
Whether Marston started the revival or an earlier revival than 
we know inspired Marston, certain it is that a couple of years 
later The Spanish Tragedy was revived on the stage with 
great success and that no less a man than Ben Jonson was 
paid for additions, chiefly to the psychology (as we should 
call it) of the protagonist Hieronimo, the distracted father 
who seeks where to apply his vengeance for the murder of his 
innocent son. By 1603 the earliest quarto of The Revenge of 
Hamlet Prince of Denmark was printed. It was enlarged and 
revised in the following year, and a third version, differing 
in important particulars, appeared in the folio, seven years 
after Shakespeare's death. The rewriting of Kyd's old 
Hamlet by a rival company so soon after the revival and revi- 
sion of The Spanish Tragedy, with Antonio's Revenge still 
holding the stage, makes all but irresistible the inference that 
these two old plays of Kyd were rewritten and revised in 
emulation the one with the other by the two greatest drama- 
tists of their time. The problem that confronts the student 
as to this most notable of all the plays of Shakespeare is com- 
plex and difficult, and with the data at hand quite insoluble. 
Nor is the matter helped by the loss of any trace of Kyd's 
old Hamlet or the existence of a German version of the play 
derived from England, but whether before or after the Shake- 
spearean quartos is doubtful. What was the nature of Kyd 's 
original Hamlet ? What parts have been retained by Shake- 
speare, and what are his changes and departures ? What is 
the true relation of all these versions ? Such are some of the 
questions we should like definitely answered but which seem, 
despite all the scholarship lavished upon them, likely to remain 
"in the backward and abysm of time." 

Fortunately for the enjoyment of this world tragedy we 
need none of these extraneous matters. To the understand- 
ing of Shakespeare's depth of thought and wisdom we may 



THE TRAGEDY OF REVENGE 259 

bring all the native wit and the added learning we may have 
acquired and it will be none too much; but for these plays^ 
as works of fiction, verily he who runs may read, though he 
must often content himself with a meaning rather than the 
meaning. Therefore the madness or soundness of Hamlet^ 
the degree of his mother's guilt, was Ophelia frail or only 
faulty, or Polonius the tedious old fool that Hamlet called him 
— these are matters unimportant in view of the truth to life, 
the insight into the depths of the human heart, and the larger 
philosophy of life which this great drama gives us. We may 
outlive the form of these dramas and find conventional and 
stale the measured words and cadenced melody of their 
rhetoric (if Mr. Shaw will so have it), but the sanity of Shake- 
speare's outlook on life is imperishable, and when we have 
degenerately ceased to respond to his poetry we must remain 
the subjects of his wit and of that incomparable wisdon that 
flashes impartially on all and illumines whatever it touches. 
But our tale of the tragedy of revenge is not yet cornplete. 
In 1602 Henry Chettle put forth his melodramatic Tragedy 
of Hoffman or a Revenge for a Father, which it is impossible 
to believe was not written at least after the revival of the older 
Hamlet if not subsequent to the appearance on the stage of 
the earlier Shakespearean version of that play. Chettle 
heaped several additional horrors on those already invented 
by Marston and is especially ingenious in the variety of dread- 
ful deaths by which his characters depart from this life. 
About this time was staged The Atheist's Tragedy by Cyril 
Tourneur, as appears by the title-page. Tourneur lived 
much abroad, chiefly in the Low Countries; and his slender 
literary work is negligible except for this play and a second. 
The Revenger s Tragedy, printed without his name in 1607. 
Both are powerful and effective dramas full of action and 
inventive device although they differ materially in atmosphere 
and design, the first assuming the moralist's attitude towards 
life and crime, The Revenger s Tragedy flaunting a bitterly 
cynical outlook on the world and all its doings. This con- 
trast has raised a question as to whether both plays can be by 
the same hand. Whatever the truth of this matter, in terrible 



26o THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

realism of effect, in mastery of horror and poetry, The Re- 
venger s Tragedy takes its place in our drama as second only 
to Webster himself in these high qualities of tragic art. 
With the intervention between the two plays just named of 
Chapman's Revenge of Bussy D'Amhois already mentioned, 
we complete the list of tragedies of revenge, at least of the 
type strictly so called. The tragedy of revenge from its very 
nature deals with crime, conscience, and remorse. These 
plays make potent use of the supernatural and other terrors. 
Chapman is the clumsiest in the use of such devices; Marston 
and Tourneur are more successfully inventive. Shake- 
speare's ghosts trascend their disembodied fellows as his men 
and women excel the characters of other dramatists. And 
this is not because he was less willing to obscure in his art the 
line that marks what most men feel that they do know from 
that which they mistrust, as because the Shakespearean ghost 
is always true to the seat of his origin in the psychology of man. 
To classify the subjects of Jacobean tragedy would be to 
run the gamut of human passion: love, jealousy, revenge, 
ambition, pride, all are there, as Shakespeare alone is enough 
to disclose. A powerful if forbidding group of tragedies is 
that which deals with womanhood in that deadly perversion 
by which woman exists but for the destruction of man. Such 
figures were Tamora in Titus Andronicus and the "lasci- 
vious queen" of Lust's Dominion, mistakenly attributed to 
Marlowe. Middleton, Marston, and Webster each contrib- 
uted a drama of unusual reputation to this class and all three 
fall close to the year 1612. Middleton's Women Beware 
Women relates in its major plot the career of Bianca Capello, 
who is represented as at first the innocent victim of a lady- 
procuress, Livia, to the Duke de' Medici's lust, but sinks by 
steps to murder. A still more revolting underplot makes up 
an intricate but clearly constructed piece of realism, terrible 
in its truth as it is superlative in its art. The Insatiate Countess 
of Marston (though his authorship has sometimes been ques- 
tioned) tells of the headlong career of a petulant wanton and 
the havoc that was wrought by her beauty and her crimes. 
Marston had treated the same theme, less luridly though 



JOHN WEBSTER 261 

scarcely with less effect, in The Dutch Courtesan, described 
as a comedy and linking, in the contrast that it sustains, with 
the domestic dramas of the good wife and the wanton. The 
third of these tragedies is Webster's Vittoria Corombona other- 
wise known as The White Devil. 

John Webster, concerning the details of whose life we 
know next to nothing, appears first in the history of the drama 
as a co-worker, especially with Dekker, in Henslowe's mart 
of plays. This collaboration begot the chronicle play Sir 
Thomas JVyatt and the Middletonian comedies of manners. 
Westward Hoe and Nortward Hoe, all on the stage by 1604 
or 1605. Webster's hand in other plays does not concern us 
as his authorship is doubtful. His unaided extant work 
comprises four plays. The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi. 
The Devil's Law Case, and Appius and Virginia, published 
variously in 1612, 1623, and 1654 and written it is difficult to 
say precisely when. The Devil's Law Case is a romantic 
comedy of no very striking excellence; Appius and Virginia, 
a tragedy on the well-known classical story of very genuine 
merit, though restrained and self-contained in great contrast 
to the robust romanticism of Webster's most characteristic 
work. It is on the two romantic tragedies that remain that 
the reputation of Webster, as our greatest dramatist in the 
domain of the terrible, rests secure, for there are no tragedies 
of their kind that surpass them. 

The White Devil purports to be the actual life-history of 
"Vittoria Corombona, the famous Venetian courtesan." It 
deals with the profligate Duke of Brachiano's infatuation for 
Vittoria and the resulting tragedy to them both. But no 
description can make clear the brilliant and fascinating per- 
sonality of this "innocent-seeming white devil" of decadent 
Italy, and the vivid group of personages — the cynical Fla- 
mineo, her brother, her helpless and distracted mother, the 
politic brothers Medici and Monticelso — that surround her. 
The White Devil, because it departs both in general intent and 
in many details from the facts of the celebrated case of the real 
Vittoria Accoramboni, has been thought to have been derived 
from the hearsay of some Italian traveler returned. The 



262 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

story of The Duchess of Malfi, on the other hand, represents 
an embarassment of sources, though Webster unquestionably 
found the version that he used in the old quarry for Eliza- 
bethan playwrights, Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Webster's 
tragedy has been customarily dated after Shakespeare's 
death. It now appears that an actor, Willam Osteler, who 
took a part in The Duchess of Malfi, died towards the close of 
the year 1614. Indeed, it has been well argued that the like- 
ness of Webster's two tragedies should place their composition 
close together. Perhaps 16 10 for The White Devil and 1 6 12 
for The Duchess of Malfi is as near as need be. The latter 
tragedy tells of the vengeance which two brothers took on the 
duchess, their sister, for marrying without their knowledge or 
consent, a man in every respect worthy of her love, save for his 
rank. The refinements of their cruelty, carried out with inex- 
orable precision to the bitter end, by a creature of their making, 
named Bosola; the steadfast, heroic fatalism of the duchess; 
the contrasted wickedness of the brothers, especially the re- 
morse of Ferdinand, are among the finest things in the whole 
range of tragic literature and compare in the gnomic wisdom, 
the brilliant diction, and admirable poetry in which the drama 
is set with Shakespeare himself when all but at his greatest. 
Attention has been called to the success with which Webster 
creates an atmosphere of ominous gloom in these masterful 
tragedies, and how he works at times, in a manner familiar 
to Shakespeare, by means of instantaneous dramatic moments 
charged with revealing passion. The influence of the master- 
poet on Webster has thus been happily called not literary but 
dramatic, and it is conceivable that it may have been derived 
less from a reading of Shakespeare's plays than from a study 
of them on the boards as acted. ^ As an example of the Web- 
sterian atmosphere take his transfigured use of the familiar 
lyrists' device of an echo in The Duchess of Malfi. Antonio, 
whose beloved duchess lies dead with her children, although 
he does not know it, is on his way with a friend to meet his 

^ See M. W. Sampson, Webster^ Belles Lettres Series, Introduction, 
p. xix. 



"THE DUCHESS OF MALFI" 263 

own death. The scene, as so often with Shakespeare, is 
vividly suggested in the dialogue. 

Delia. This fortification 
Grew from the ruins of an ancient abbey: 
And to yond side o' th' river, Hes a wall. 
Piece of a cloister, which in my opinion 
Gives the best echo that you ever heard; 
So hollow and so dismal, and withal 
So plain in the distinction of our words, 
That many have supposed it is a spirit^ 
That answers. 

Antonio. I do love these ancient ruins. 
We never tread upon them but we set 
Our foot upon some reverend history; 
And questionless, here in this open court, 
Which now lies naked to the injuries 
Of stormy weather, some men lie interred 
Loved the church so well, and gave so largely to 't. 
They thought it should have canopied their bones 
Till doomsday. But all things have their end: 
Churches and cities (which have diseases like to men) 
Must have like death that we have. 

Echo. Like death that we have. 

Delio. Now the echo hath caught you. 

Ant. It groaned, me thought, and gave 
A very deadly accent ? 

Echo. Deadly accent. 

Delio. I told you 'twas a pretty one. You may make it 
A huntsman, or a falconer, a musician, 
Or a thing of sorrow. 

Echo. A thing of sorrow. 

Ant. Aye, sure: that suits it best. 

Echo. That suits it best. 

Ant. 'Tis very like my wife's voice. 

Echo. Aye, wife's voice. 

Delio. Come: let's us walk farther from 't. 
I would not have you go to th' cardinal's to-night: 
Do not. 

Echo. Do not. 



264 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

Ant. Necessity compels me: 
Make scrutiny throughout the passages 
Of your own life; you '11 find it impossible 
To fly your fate. 

Echo. fly your fate. 

Delta. Hark: the dead stones seem to have pity on you 
And give you good counsel. 

Ant. Echo, I will not talk with thee; 
For thou art a dead thing. 

Echo. Thou art a dead thing. 

Ant. My duchess is asleep now, 
And her little ones, I hope sweetly: oh heaven. 
Shall I never see her more ? 

Echo. Never see her more. 

As to the instantaneous dramatic moments, charged with 
revealing passion, such are the much quoted: 
I am the Duchess of Malfi still, 

and Ferdinand's words, as his sister lies dead before him: 
Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle: she died young. 

Of almost equal intensity is the last cry of Vittoria: 
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm 
Is driven I know not whither. 

Returning to the tragedies of Shakespeare, Titus, Romeo 
and Juliet, the Roman plays, with Timon and Hamlet, each 
has received from us thus far that modicum of attention which 
a book of this plan can give it. There remain Othello, Lear, 
and Macbeth. Othello is the master tragedy on the passion 
of jealousy which Shakespeare had already touched in comedy 
in Ford of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and which he was 
to treat so much more fully in King Leontes of The Winter s 
Tale and Leonatus Posthumus in Cymheline. Just as Shake- 
speare raised the theme of man's love for woman to an ideal-, 
ized beauty in Romeo and Juliet and yet left it of the earth 
that engenders it earthy, so he ennobled, while in no wise 
emasculating its strength and terror, the venomous passion 
of jealousy. There is scarcely anything in which Shake- 
speare is so in contrast with his competitors in the drama of 



"OTHELLO" AND "KING LEAR" 265 

his time, for none has so contrived to preserve the dignity of 
human character in the midst of the infirmities of passion 
that beset it. Othello is usually dated 1604, after Hamlet 
and immediately preceding King Lear. The barest hints in 
a novel of Cinthio's Hecatommithi served for the framing of 
Othello, Desdemona, and lago; and Cassio's drunkenness, 
Emilia's theft of the handkerchief, and the whole handling of 
the catastrophe w^ith much else are altogether Shakespeare's 
invention. With his entire lurid brotherhood from the 
tragedy of revenge about him — Vindici, Hoffman, Antonio, 
D'Amville, and the rest — lago remains the arch villain of all 
literature. All of these "revengers" have a real impetus for 
their crimes except D'Amville, and he dies mad. De Flores 
in The Changeling is no more than a masterful voluptuary, 
v^illing to face death v^ith unutterable crimes that he may 
enjoy and drag down with him the woman he has singled out 
for his victim. Webster's Bosola, who resembles lago in his 
outspoken "honesty," is a connoisseur in crime, satiating a 
morbid curiosity in the tortures of his victims and yet revert- 
ing to his better self momentarily in the end. In lago alone 
is villainy wanton and gratuitous and the monstrous fruit of 
petty and serpentine envy. And yet with all his malignity, 
subtlety, and venomous spite, the most terrible thing about 
lago is that he remains human. 

King Lear is best dated 1605; for in that year the old play. 
King Leir and his Three Daughters (on which Shakespeare's 
tragedy is founded), was entered in the Stationers' Register 
and published, a thing unaccountable except on the assump- 
tion that the subject had been revived on the stage or else- 
where. From the point of view of ultimate source. King 
Lear is a chronicle play; as the story, told in Geoffrey of 
Monmouth, recurs in Holinshed, The Mirror for Magistrates, 
and elsewhere, and was accepted, with other such "history," 
in its day. The underplot of Gloster and his blinding, with 
his contrasted faithful and wicked son, skilfully parallels the 
main story and is derived, in its essentials, from an episode 
of Sidney's Arcadia. But here, as in Macbeth, Shakespeare 
has not only glorified his material, he has transmuted it into 



266 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

a something so entirely new that the accident of its origin — 
like the origin of the sad-eyed clown — is a matter of no 
moment. Lear is a tragedy of overpowering force and torren- 
tial swiftness. In no work of Shakespeare's are his personages 
so intensely conceived and nowhere does he more poignantly 
reach the heart than in this pitiful tale of hapless Cordelia 
and her distracted father. 

With Macbeth — another chronicle play from its source 
in Holinshed but equally glorified above its type — we bring 
this enumeration of Shakespeare's tragedies to a close. Mac- 
beth was written in 1605 or 1606, and doubtless after King 
Lear. It appeared in print for the first time in the folio, and 
it has been supposed suffered some mutilation of text and inter- 
polation in a couple of scenes, found likewise in Middleton's 
fVitch, a comedy of uncertain date. The opening scenes 
between Macbeth and his wife, the knocking at the gate, the 
appearance of Banquo's ghost, the prophecies of the witches 
in Macbeth's second interview with them, and the sleep- 
walking of Lady Macbeth, these are some of the things not 
found in the chronicle but found in the play. But little does 
this indicate the welding into a complete dramatic organism 
of this story of inordinate but halting ambition, steadied by 
marvelous constancy and wifely devotion in evil, and lured 
on to inevitable overthrow by the supernatural agency of 
"the weird sisters." 

Were we to look for a prodigy in letters, where could we 
find the equal of 'Julius Ccesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, 
Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, six master tragedies of 
all time, written in little more than the same number of years 
with the several serious comedies that accompanied them as 
well ? The range of feeling, the depth of wisdom and under- 
standing, to say nothing of the dramatic art and the sheer 
poetry of these great tragedies, stand out and beyond the 
achievements in literature of all other men in other times. 
And we read and study them, finding new truth and beauty 
in them as perennially as in nature and the return of spring. 
It is a great tribute to Shakespeare's genius that we disagree, 
as we do, about his people. Ordinary art produces much the 



THE TECHNIQUE OF SHAKESPEARE 267 

same effect on each and every reader. We see the same object 
and agree, about it. About real persons, historical or of our 
acquaintance, there is room for greater difference of opinion. 
It is because Shakespeare's characters are so real that we in- 
terpret them so variously, that we fall out about the sanity of 
Hamlet or the sincerity of HenryV. But Shakespeare's real- 
ism is far from all. Equally with Sophocles does Shake- 
speare in these great tragedies uphold the nobility and poetic 
elevation of the tragic art. His personages and their doings 
are absorbing above the interest that we feel in actual men 
because their innate qualities and capabilities, the things 
they do, they feel, and suffer, are resolved for us by the poet's 
energy into a finer, more logical and dignified reality than are 
ever these things in life. 

We have traced above — as it is customary to trace them 
— some of the characteristics that marked the strengthening 
and ripening of Shakespeare's genius in his verse and style, 
his rhetoric and his taste. The technique of his dramatic art 
also grew strong with use and maturing genius. There is 
Love's Labor's Lost with its King of Navarre and the Princess of 
France, each attended respectively by three lords and three 
ladies who speak in strict alternation and, save for Biron, with 
as little to distinguish them as the three kings of Brentford. 
In Romeo and Juliet when the Montagues and Capulets assem- 
ble in the opening scene, the scene is built up like an arch: 
serving man of Montague, serving man of Capulet; Montague, 
Capulet; kinsman of Montague, kinsman of Capulet; Mon- 
tague, Capulet, Lady Montague and Lady Capulet, with the 
prince for a cap-stone. This is not much better than Gorho- 
duc. Such is not the daring structure at large of King Lear, 
with the plot of the king and his good and evil daughters 
paralleled and enforced with the story of Gloster and his good 
and evil sons, and the daring contrast, in that supreme scene 
of the storm, of senile dementia, congenital imbecility, and 
feigned madness. Much has been written of late on Shake- 
speare as a constructive artist, some wisely, some not so well. 
It has been thought that virtue lies in discovering "the cli- 
max" of Macbeth; and the precise point at which "the tragic 



268 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

force" of Othello arises is a thing to be argued with zeal and 
defended with might. A few years ago quite a new science of 
dramatic structure arose, founded on Freitag's interpretation 
of certain lecture notes of one of the students of Aristotle 
entitled the Poetics, and on other peoples' improvements and 
additions to Freitag. Moreover this new science, after the 
manner of new sciences, begot a horrid and numerous progeny 
of technical terms such as "motivation," "enveloping, 
counter and main action," "passion-movement," "deration- 
alization," and "shock of Nemesis," with many things to 
learn and more to ponder. Now there is surely no more harm 
in charts of dramaticstructure or diagrams of character-contact 
than in charts of the force of the wind or prognostications of 
temperature. But the last are no more the cause of good 
weather than the first are any real helps to our understanding 
of the genius of Shakespeare. We may admit that, if the 
truth be told and all the plays considered, Shakespeare is not 
conspicuous as a merely constructive dramatist. Jonson 
could write a more ingenious play, and one better able, in 
Ascham's quaint phrase, "to abide the precepts of Aristotle." 
Shakespeare had before him something better than elaborate 
and clever structure in which the mind is directed from the 
subject in hand to admiration for the cleverness of the artist 
or the difficulty of the problem. Shakespeare was seeking 
the dramatic and poetic picturing of life; for the rest he cared 
not a jot or tittle. Hence his carelessness at times and his 
indifference where lesser men would show anxiety; though, 
none the less, in tragedy where rigor of cause and effect is most 
demanded, there is little surplusage in Shakespeare's method 
and he rarely deviates from the direct course of his story. 
In this whole matter of dramatic structure it would be well 
to consider less the standard rule, whatever its learned deri- 
vation, and more the individual organic structure. It is of 
less importance to know that Shakespeare habitually reaches 
the turning-point of his action in the middle of the third act 
than to recognize that the organism of Hamlet is not that of 
Macbeth or Othello. Antony and Cleopatra is straggling and 
well drawn out in structure, for the events were long preparing 



THE REALISM OF SHAKESPEARE 269 

that brought about the fall of these royal infatuated lovers. 
Hamlet, too, is lengthy and slow of development in harmony 
with the doubt and hesitancy that paralized the "revenger's" 
purpose and in accord with his introspective and pondering 
nature. Othello progresses gradually with the sinuous glides 
of serpentine lago, to rush to immediate and overwhelming 
catastrophe when the passion of Othello breaks from lago's 
guidance and suggestion. Macbeth is swift and accelerated 
as crime begets crime and remorse follows hard on the heels 
of ambition. Finally, Lear is of a torrential swiftness, bearing 
innocent and guilty alike to destruction, for the decree that 
carelessly dismembered a kingdom and banished Cordelia 
was the decree of a madman. 

It is easy to see, as we read Shakespeare's plays in the 
general order of their writing, that Shakespeare viewed the 
world as mirrored in them from the changing points of 
vantage that mark his own growth from youth to the sager 
attitude of middle life. It was a young man that depicted the 
fire and passion of the lovers, Romeo and Juliet, and it was a 
younger man who was contented with the badinage and occa- 
sional silliness oi Love's Labor's Lost. Shakespeare's attitude 
towards older people in the earlier plays also shows his youth. 
The elder Capulet is viewed solely from the lovers' point of 
view. Much might be said for the prudence and respecta- 
bility of that old gentleman. Friar Laurence, too, talks ex- 
actly as a young man thinks that he has observed old men to 
talk. It was not for nothing that Shakespeare went through 
the Slough of Despond, depicted in the gloomier comedies of 
disillusion; for in the later tragedies is disclosed that fuller 
power that comes with years to sound the deeps of human 
crime and passion, till, in the latest plays we find Shakespeare 
again and again assuming the attitude of the older and wiser 
man who lives over again in recollection the past that once 
was his and seeks his real happiness in the joy and hopeful- 
ness of those who are shortly to succeed him. 

The variety of Elizabethan tragedies as to subject, nature, 
and treatment calls for no further word. As a whole this 
drama is realistic and outspoken, unrestrained, and often 



270 THE HEYDAY OF TRAGEDY 

melodramatic. Such men as Marston, Webster, and Tour- 
neur loved to pile horror on horror. Less legitimate are the 
devices, later to be more lawlessly employed, w^hereby tragic 
themes are further heightened by making their motives ab- 
normal: thus the ungodly become atheistic or at least cyni- 
cally abandoned, and lust is supplanted by the horrible motive 
of incest. In contrast with his fellows in the drama, Shake- 
speare is alv/ays true to the normal mainsprings of human 
action and passion, however he may heighten his effects by a 
momentary fidelity to the coarser actualities of life. Shake- 
speare is always frankly realistic, where realism seems to him 
to be demanded by the nature of his subject. Moreover, 
Shakespeare's age frequently looked for realism where the 
usage of our time demands reticence or at least periphrasis. 
No two things are more commonly confused by most of us in 
our daily colloquial judgments of conduct than manners and 
morals. Manners are parochial, morals cosmopolitan. The 
manners of Shakespeare's day were not ours. Our manners 
might equally have shocked Shakespeare; for they are tem- 
porary as his were temporary. The moral atmosphere per- 
vading Shakespeare's plays in large calls for few apologies to 
our age, although our speech is more refined. Shakespeare 
never confounds right and wrong; he never leaves you in 
doubt as to his attitude on important questions. Lear was 
half crazed and scarcely responsible for his folly, Cordelia had 
much to excuse her momentary stubbornness and unwilling- 
ness to humor her father's dotage with a few kind words, yet 
both are overwhelmed in expiation. Never was man more 
practised on by diabolical cunning and malice than was 
Othello, yet his doubt quite as much as his crime deserved 
the logic of his death. 

Li few things does Shakespeare differ more completely 
from the majority of the dramatists of his age than in his 
attitude towards woman. In the fine words of Ruskin: 
"Shakespeare has no heroes; — he has only heroines. . . . 
The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly 
or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the 
wisdom and virtue of a woman, and failing that, there is none." 



THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE 271 

There is no cheap gallantry in these words nor in the dramatist 
whose deep insight into the manner of this world they cele- 
brate. Indeed, for the flippancy and heartlessness of con- 
temporary gallantry we must consult, not the works of Shake- 
speare, but those of Fletcher and Middleton. Except for 
those monsters of wickedness, Tamora, the two daughters of 
Lear, and wretched, trivial Cressida — a preposterous little 
trull for a fair youth like Troilus to trouble his heart about — 
there is scarcely a woman wholly bad in all Shakespeare. 
As to Cleopatra, in the romantic glory of her abandon to love 
as the all of the world, Shakespeare's Cleopatra is as distin- 
guishable from the several frigid portraits of the Egyptian 
queen in Shakespeare's age as she is immeasureably above 
Mr. Shaw's ridiculous hoyden or Signor Ferrero's dainty and 
heartless Parisian with a genius for politics 

But enough; in Shakespeare and Webster, English tragedy 
touched the elevation and dignity of the drama of iEschylus 
and Sophocles. Thereafter it declined and was superceded 
in popularity by a novel variety of play variously known as 
tragicomedy or "romance." This last stage of the drama 
in Shakespeare's lifetime claims a later and separate treat- 
ment, and to that place we here defer it. 



CHAPTER XV 

TRANSLATION IN VERSE AND PROSE 

'E are apt to think of the age of Elizabeth as the age 
of Shakespeare and therefore the age of the drama; 
or as the time when the new inductive system was proposed 
as a substitute for outworn medieval methods of thought, and 
therefore as the age of Bacon. Remembering how the lyric 
flourished until England was a veritable "nest of singing birds," 
we dub Elizabeth's the age of the lyric; or recalling who first 
circled the globe and rifled the wealth of Spain in the cradle 
of its birth, we call Elizabeth's the age of discovery. Look 
where we will on that incomparable time we behold men 
physically, mentally, and spiritually active with the indefati- 
gable buoyancy of youth which like each returning spring is 
always a new wonder. When the extraordinary interest 
which the sixteenth century took in the classics, in modern 
foreign literatures, French, Spanish, and especially Italian is 
considered, when we add, too, to all this the fact that it was 
within this period that the greatest of translations, our Eng- 
lish Bible, was wrought by successive recastings to its per- 
fection, the age of translation must seem no misnomer. Some 
years since an industrious scholar attempted an appraisement 
of Elizabethan translations from the Italian in three cr four 
successive contributions. I say "attempted," not because the 
work was not well done, but because such a work could 
scarcely be pronounced complete except after exhaustive 
research quite disproportionate to its results. In the first 
paper there is mention of one hundred and sixty translations 
from the Italian within the hundred and ten years from 1550 
to 1660 "made by ninety or more translators including nearly 
every well-known Elizabethan author except Shakespeare 
and Bacon": Jonson and Donne might likewise have been 
excepted. When the last of these researches was complete, 

272 



THE AGE OF TRANSLATION 273 

the total had risen to two hundred and eighteen English trans- 
lations of two hundred and twenty-three Italian authors in 
general literature and poetry, this not including more than 
as many more that Lamb would have called "books in sheep's 
clothing." A more recent appraisement of Spanish books 
printed in Tudor England, including translations from the 
Castilian tongue, mounts up to one hundred and sixty titles. 
And a similar appraisement for France shows, only within 
the lifetime of Shakespeare, the surprising total of nearly four 
hundred titles. Though in this last list there are many cases, 
such as North's translations of Amyot's French version of 
Plutarch's Lives, in which French is simply the intermediary 
language between the English translation and a classical, 
Spanish, or Italian original. We await appraisements such 
as these for the Dutch and Flemish books that found their 
way into Elizabethan England in their native garb or trans- 
lated. Even they could not have been inconsiderable; and 
they were certainly more in number and in influence than the 
few scatterd books printed in the language of High Almaine, 
as Germany was then called, that came into England for the 
most part through some other foreign channel.^ Now, if we 
add to this mass of translation from modern foreign languages 
the numerous English translations of the classics, from Bellen- 
den's Livy, 1536, one of the earliest if not the first translation 
of a Latin classic in England, to Chapman's Homer, completed 
in the year of Shakespeare's death, remembering that the list 
includes Horace, Juvenal, Vergil by three translators, Ovid, 
at least in part, by four or five, Caesar, Seneca, the dramas 
and the prose, Lucan's Pharsalia, Apuleius, Heliodorus, Sue- 
tonius, parts of Plautus and Terence, with Hesiod, and 
Musaeus, parts of Theocritus, besides Homer, at one extreme 
and Tacitus, Plutarch, and Josephus at the other, no question 
can possibly remain as to the activity of the age in this placing 
of foreign words in English dress. 

* As to these appraisements see the work of Miss M. A. Scott in 
the Publications of the Modern Language Association, 1895-1899; and 
the monographs of Einstein, Underhill, and Upham in Columbia 
University Studies in English, 1902-1908. 



274 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

With such a mass of material before us, it is plain that it 
will be better to pick and choose a few typical translations 
which for one or another reason have most deeply affected 
the literature of their time rather than to attempt anything 
like an appraisement in mass of this largely forgotten material. 
In the time of the experiments in classical meters it was but 
natural that attempts should have been made to cloak the 
English version in a garb supposedly representing the ancient 
form. Surrey tried two books of the Mneid in blank-verse 
in 1557. In 1582, Richard Stanihurst, the Irish scholar and 
contributor to Holinshed's Chronicles, turned four books 
of the same great epic into hexameters, expressed in an eccen- 
tricity of vocabulary and grotesque homeliness of speech which 
excite new wonder whenever read. Thomas Drant, another 
like experimenter, theorized on hexameters, but translated 
the Satires of Horace and his Ars Poetica as well as parts of 
the Iliad into English rime. Arthur Golding had adequately, 
if diffusely, translated the Metamorphoses of Ovid, with Caesar 
and Seneca's prose also, in the sixties and seventies, and the 
young Marlowe was drawn to the J mores of Ovid as he was 
drawn to reconstruct the fragment of Musaeus on Hero and 
Leander by the warmth of the Renaissance imagination which 
begot as well the luscious sensuousness of Shakespeare's 
Venus and Adonis. Marlowe's translation of the Amores 
is that of a poet. 

We do not know precisely the relations of Chapman to 
Marlowe; they must certainly have been intimate, for Chap- 
man followed closely in Marlowe's footsteps, not only in the 
drama, but in translation, first Englishing Ovid's Banquet of 
Sense, and then completing, as we have already seen, Marlowe's 
unfinished Hero and Leander. George Chapman was an 
older man than Jonson and Marston, with both of whom we 
have already found him in , association in the writing of 
Eastward Hoe. Chapman was born in 1559 at Hitchin in 
Hertfordshire, and was educated at Oxford, leaving, however, 
without a degree. He was late in turning tp literature; at 
least there is no record of any publication by him before 
The Shadow of the Night, two poetical hymns, in 1594. The 



GEORGE CHAPMAN 275 

translation from Ovid, just mentioned, followed immediately- 
after. It has been thought that Chapman wrote plays only 
under protest and for a livelihood. Allusions in Henslowe's 
Diary place his probable beginnings in comedy as far back 
as 1596, and plays of his were in print — witness The Blind 
Beggar of Alexandria and A Humorous Day's Mirth — by 
1598 and 1599. Chapman's repute in the drama is referable 
to his romantic comedies, such as The Gentleman Usher, 
acted in 1602, and Monsieur D'Olive, 1605, as well as to his 
comedies of humor and intrigue and to his several dramas 
dealing with all but contemporary French history, of both of 
which we have heard. But Chapman was, besides, an original 
poet of repute, although his poems of this class are for the 
most part occasional. Among them may be named his Tears 
of Peace, 1609, an Epicede or Funeral Song on the death of his 
patron. Prince Henry, and Andromeda Liber ata, 1 6 14. This 
last celebrates in most unfitting allegory the infamous marriage 
of the notorious Somerset with the divorced Countess of 
Essex; and was a mistake characteristic of a scholar immersed 
in his studies and myopic as to the significance of passing 
events. This must have destroyed once and for all any chances 
of preferment that the poet may have had. In all his poetry 
Chapman is strenuous, intellectual, not emotional, with a 
large sense for the phrase, but often wanting in taste and plung- 
ing in the mazes of a contorted, difficult, and obscure style. 
It has often been remarked that no poet of his own time so 
resembled Ben Jonson. And this is true save for clarity of 
diction, sense of proportion, and restraint, none of which are 
among the virtues of Chapman. On the other hand, of no 
poet of the age, outside of Shakespeare, can it be said that he 
has left us so many poetical passages, moralizing wisely and 
memorably on life, and quotable alike for their significance and 
the beauty of their diction. 

Chapman's famous translation of Homer was by no means 
the first attempt to English the father of Greek poetry. Aside 
from Drant's unpublished fragments of the Iliad, written 
before 1580, Arthur Hall had published in the following year 
Ten Books of Homer s Iliads, translated out of French in old- 



276 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

fashioned, fourteen-line, riming measure, a clumsy and inac- 
curate version. Chapman must have begun his Homeric 
studies well back in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, for the 
first instalment of his work, Seven Books of the Iliads, appeared 
in print in 1598, dedicated to the popular hero of the moment, 
the young Earl of Essex. A second instalment dedicated to 
Prince Henry followed in 1609; the Iliad wzs complete in 161 1, 
the Odyssey in 16 16. Chapman, always in poverty and holding 
the common world in lofty disdain, was encouraged by the 
prince in his translation and with the prince's untimely death 
all hope of reward for the poet's years of toil was at an end. 
Few translations have been more enthusiastically admired 
than Chapman's, even although his learning has been im- 
pugned by those who could never have translated anything 
into a poetical line. The unflagging and devoted zeal which 
Chapman brought to the prosecution of this great under- 
taking is only exceeded by the genuine poetic spirit that per- 
vades it all. Nor can we say that either his zeal, his learning, 
or his poetry deserted Chapman in his other translations, of 
Hesiod, of parts oi^uvenal, of the Homeric Hymns, and The 
Battle of the Frogs and Mice which his diligence also achieved. 
As a specimen of Chapman's translation let us take these 
lines from the famous speech in which Hector, departing for 
his fatal combat with Achilles, replies to the entreaties of 
Andromache : 

Be well assured, wife, all these things in my kind cares are weighted. 
But what a shame and fear it is to think how Troy would scorn 
(Both in her husbands and her wives, whom long-trained gowns 

adorn) 
That I should cowardly fly off! The spirit I first did breathe 
Did never teach me that; much less, since the contempt of death 
Was settled in me, and my mind knew what a worthy was. 
Whose office is to lead in fight and give no danger pass 
Without improvement. In this fire must Hector s trial shine; 
Here must his country, father, friends, he in him, made divine. 
And such a stormy day shall come (in mind and soul I know) 
When sacred Troy shall shed her towers, for tears of overthrow; 
When Priam, all his birth and power, shall in those tears be drowned. 
But neither Troy's posterity so much my soul doth wound, 



CHAPMAN'S "HOMER" 277 

Priam, nor Hecuba herself, nor all my brothers' woes, 

(Who though so many and so good must all be food for foes) 

As thy sad state; when some rude Greek shall lead thee weeping 

hence, 
These free days clouded, and a night of captive violence 
Loading thy temples, out of which thine eyes must never see. 
But spin the Greek wives' webs of task and their fetch-water be 
To Argos, from Messeides, or clear Hyperia's spring; 
Which howsoever thou abhorr'st. Fate 's such a shrewish thing 
She will be mistress.^ 

Well may Matthew Arnold have remarked, "How^ ingen- 
iously Homer's plain strength is tormented" ; for the v^ords 
in this passage italicized by Arnold mark amplifications on 
the original which are wholly Elizabethan and only to an Eliza- 
bethan an improvement. And yet no translator of Homer 
who has followed Chapman has surpassed him in poetic spirit 
and none dare leave his version unconsulted. Well may 
Coleridge have said that Chapman's Homer is as truly an 
original poem as The Faery Queen. Indeed it is precisely on 
this score of originality, which was not to be had except in 
these very definite departures from the spirit and the letter of 
his text, that Chapman has been most severely criticized. 
When all has been said, however, concerning Chapman's 

^ For comparison, here is the same passage in the version of 
Lang, Leaf and Myers: "Then great Hector of the glancing helm 
answered her: Surely I take thought for all these things, my wife; but 
I have very sore shame of the Trojans and Trojan dames with trailing 
robes, if like a coward I shrink away from battle. Moreover mine 
own soul forbiddeth me, seeing I have learnt ever to be valiant and 
fight in the forefront of the Trojans, winning my father's great glory 
and mine own. Yea of a surety I know this in heart and soul; the 
day shall come for holy Ilios to be laid low, and Priam and the folk of 
Priam of the good ashen spear. Yet doth the anguish of the Trojans 
hereafter not so much trouble me, neither Hekabe's own, neither 
King Priam's, neither my brethren's, the many and brave that shall 
fall in the dust before their foemen, as doth thine anguish in the day 
when some mail-clad Achaian shall lead thee weeping and rob thee of 
the light of freedom. So shalt thou abide in Argos and ply the loom 
at another woman's bidding, and bear water from fount Messeis or 
Hypereia, being grievously entreated, and sore constraint shall be 
laid upon thee." 



278 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

"barbarizing of Homer" and transmuting with a high Teu- 
tonic hand the Iliad into a species of Niebelungen Lied, it 
may be doubted if the age of Shakespeare could have pro- 
duced a poet better fitted for the work. Jonson, or possibly 
Drayton, alone combined the scholarship, the industry, and 
the poetic instinct for such a task; but Jonson wanted the 
generous heroic spirit that sustains the pages of Chapman; 
and Drayton, with all that he might have gained in clarity of 
diction over Chapman, is as little likely as Spenser himself 
to have escaped (even to the degree to which Chapman es- 
caped it) the fantasticality of thought and ornateness of treat- 
ment that must have kept every true Elizabethan at arm's 
length from the simple brevity and severe sufficiency of 
Homeric art. 

No other poetical translation of the classics in this age is 
comparable to Chapman's work, although two excellent prose 
translations. North's Plutarch and Holland's Natural His- 
tory of Pliny, deserve places beside it. Fuller styled Phile- 
mon Holland "the translator general of his age, so that those 
books alone of his turning into English will make a country 
gentleman a competent library." Holland lived between 
1552 and 1637, was educated at Cambridge, and became a 
school-master at Coventry. His translations began in 1600 
with Livy's Roman History, and included, besides others, 
Plutarch's Morals, the Twelve Ccesars of Suetonius, and 
Xenophon's Cyropcedia. Holland also translated Camden's 
Britannia into English in 16 10, and enjoyed the popularity 
to which his industry and faculty of cursive and graphic v/riting 
entitled him. Sir Thomas North was an older man, possibly 
born as early as 1535. He did not survive into the reign of 
King James. As a younger son of Roger, the second Lord 
North, Sir Thomas enjoyed many advantages; he published 
his translation oi Plutarch's Lives in i^^^- This famous v/ork 
was not translated directly out of the Greek, but, as the title- 
page declares," out of the French" of Jaques Amyot, which had 
appeared in 1559. North had the advantage, while on an em- 
bassy with his father, of meeting Amyot who was then Bishop 
of Auxerre, so that his undertaking was well advised. With 



NORTH'S "PLUTARCH" ^ 279 

the advantage of a scholarly and in the main remarkably ac- 
curate version of an incomparable original, North contrived to 
produce a truly great translation. To this a kindliness of spirit 
and an artless directness of speech, combined w^ith a fine com- 
mand of idiomatic but far from inelegant English, contributed 
in no small degree. North's Plutarch went through six editions 
before the Restoration and remains of especial interest as the 
source vi^hence Shakespeare derived his ancient history. The 
amount of Shakespeare's obligation extended not only to the 
subjects of his well-known plays, Coriolanus, Ccesar, and 
Antony and Cleopatra, but likewise to suggestions, classical 
names for his dramatis personae, and innumerable allusions 
scattered up and down the dramatist's works. Moreover, 
in following no one of his other sources has Shakespeare 
changed so little the thought and borrowed, so often in Ic^ 
passages, the verbal raiment of another's ideas. Not only 
does he take over bodily North's picturesque and effective 
vocabulary, but he reproduces his turns of phrase and pecul- 
iarties of idiom, his arguments and figurative illustrations. 
How many of the pictured details of Enobarbus' glowing 
speech describing Cleopatra's pageant on the river Cydnus, 
Shakespeare had from North's translation of the Life of 
Antonius, the following passage will disclose: 

She disdained to set forward otherwise, but to take her barge in 
the river of Cydnus; the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, 
and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of 
the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instru- 
ments as they pla3^ed upon in the barge. And now for the person of 
herself, she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, ap- 
parelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in 
picture: and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty, fair boys 
apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their 
hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and 
gentlewomen also, the fairest of them, were apparelled like the 
nymphs, Nereids (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like 
the graces; some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes 
of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet 
savor of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf-side pestered with in- 
numerable multitudes of people. Some of them followed the barge 



28o TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

all along the river-side: others also ran out of the city to see her com- 
ing in. So that in the end, there ran such multitudes of people one 
after another to see her, that Antonius was left post alone in the mar- 
ket-place, in his imperial seat, to give audience: and there went a 
rumor in the peoples' mouths, that the goddess Venus was come to 
play with the god Bacchus, for the general good of Asia. 

It has been well said that in North alone among his sources 
Shakespeare met his match; and there are passages — such 
as the famous one describing the death of Cleopatra — in 
w^hich Shakespeare has not succeeded in bettering his original. 
North's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, "compared 
together by that grave, learned philosopher and historiog- 
rapher, Plutarch of Chaeronea," as the title runs, is a noble 
monument of simple and dignified old English and a quarry 
well worthy the use of the master-poet. 

/' Let us now turn to some of the translations from modern 
/tongues. Among the Italians the Eclogues of Mantuan seem 
/ earliest to have attracted the Elizabethan translator Turber- 
/ ville, in 1567, as they later attracted Spenser to imitation in 
The Shepherds' Calendar. With the eighties came the influx 
of the lyric, especially the sonnet, which was more frequently 
^_^- imitated than translated, and the song which was often turned 
literally into the northern tongue, syllable for syllable, that 
it might be sung to the original Italian tune. But by far the 
most important poetical translations of the age from the Italian 
were those of the epics of Tasso and Ariosto. The story is 
related how young Sir John Harington, court wit and privi- 
leged, from the queen's having stood sponsor to him at his 
christening, had the impertinence to translate and pass from 
hand to hand one of the cantos of the Orlando Furioso, to 
which Ariosto had prefixed the warning that it should be 
avoided "by ladies and those who valued ladies." Brought 
to the ears of Queen Elizabethj she bade Harington to take 
himself home and not dare to come into the royal presence 
until he could brtng back with him a complete translation of 
the Orlando. This the clever young rascal accomplished in 
haste and with ease and thus regained his royal god-mother's 
favor. Readiness and facility rather than any great poetic 



HARINGTON'S "ORLANDO FURIOSO" 281 

power characterize Harington's Orlando Furioso, which was 
printed in 1591 and enjoyed no little fame. Harington pre- 
serves the ottava rima of the original, but makes coarser the 
irony and humor of the Italian poet. A witty and capable 
preface, called An Apology for Poetry, precedes the translation. 
Here Harington discourses in justification of epics such as the 
Orlando, and upholds his brief for poetry at large with argu- 
ments against the Philistines which, as has well been said, 
men of Sidney's and Harington's intellectual caliber do not 
waste their time in employing to-day. The Orlando In- 
amorata of Boiardo was indifferently translated by Robert 
Tofte in 1598. It has been described as "singularly unequaj" 
but not without "dexterity of versification." Tofte also 
translated Two Tales from Ariosto and other Italian works. 
As to Tasso, a faithful if rather unpoetical version of the first 
five cantos of La Gerusalemne Liherata was made by Richard 
Carew, a Cornish gentleman in 1594, to be followed six years 
later by the famous and enduring rendering of the entire Work 
by Edward Fairfax. With Tass<^ pastoral Aminta, trans- ' 
lated by Abraham Fraunce in 1587, 7/ F'asioF^ido of Guarini 
by one Dymock in 1602, and the Satires of Ariosto done into 
English by the pamphleteer Gervais Markham, we complete 
an enumeration of the more important translations from 
Italian poets. 

Elizabethan translation of Italian prose began earlier and 
is far bulkier. It may be said that English translations, / 

adaptations, and imitations of the Italian novellieri constituted 
by far the most popular reading of the period of Shakespeare's 
childhood, contributing sources, it has been estimated, to 
practically a third of the drama, and furnishing an inexhausti- 
ble model and inspiration for English fiction and poetry. 
The typical Elizabethan example of a collection of/ Italian 
novelle is The Palace of Pleasure, "beautified, adorned and 
well furnished with pleasant histories and excellent novels 
selected out of divers good and commendable authors," by 
William Painter, 1566. Painter was a school-master at Seven- 
oaks and had first projected his book in 1562. A later com- 
pleted edition of this popular work contains one hundred 



282 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

and one tales, "partly translations and partly imitations of 
Italian novelle," and this is generally the character of these 
collections of stories. There were upwards of a dozen such, 
imitated and, in the quaint phrase of the day, "forged only 
for delight," up to the time when Shakespeare began his 
dramatic career; and they were, of course, his natural sources. 
Among the more important were Certain Tragical Discourses, 
the work of Sir Geoffrey Fenton, 1567; The Forest or Collec- 
tion of Histories, by Thomas Fortescue, and The Rock of 
Regard, by George Whetstone, both in 1571; A Pettie Palace 
of [George] Pettie his Pleasure, 1576; A Courtly Controversy 
of Cupid's Cautels, containing five tragical histories, by Henry 
Wotton; also Barnabe Riche his Farewell to the Military Pro- 
fession in eight novels, 158 1, and Whetstone's Heptameron of 
Civil Discourses, 1 582. Turberville's Tragical Tales are in 
verse. Single stories were many and gradually developed 
from mere translations such as Arthur Brooke's poetical ver- 
sion of Romeus and 'Juliet, 1 562, or the Excellent History of 
Euryalus and Lucretia, 1 567, to original stories purporting 
to be translations Vike Gascoigne's Adventures of Master Ferdi- 
nando Jeronimi, 1 572, originally Freeman fones, and more 
accurately Gascoigne himself. 

The Italian authors whose work appears in these English 
translations and imitations are many. Thus Whetstone 
derives his Heptameron mainly from the Hecafommithi of 
Cinthio; Barnabe Riche draws chiefly on Bandello; while 
Painter harks back to Boccaccio as well as Bandello, although 
both he and Fenton appear to have derived most of theii ma- 
terial through the intermediary of similar collections in French 
by Belleforest and Boisteau. In tracing a play through its 
foregoing versions as they appear in these collections, English, 
French, and Italian, it is not always an easy' matter to discover 
which was the probable original. In the case of Shakespeare, 
fortunately, such is his customary fidelity to his source, that 
he is more readily followed than almost any dramatist of his 
day. For example, the tragical tale of the ill-starred lovers, 
Romeo and Juliet, had been told first to Western Europe by 
Masuccio di Salerno, soon after 1470; by Luigi da Porto, in 



THE "PALACE OF PLEASURE" 283 

his story, La Giulietta, in 1535; and by Bandello, in his 
Novelle in 1554. From the last, it was translated into French 
by Boisteau to form one of the stories of Francois de Belle- 
forest's Htstoires Tragiques, 1559. Three years later, Arthur 
Brooke translated the story into English verse; and, in 1567, 
it appeared in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The essentials 
of the story have been found in a Greek romance of the second 
century, Ahrocomas and Anthia, by Xenophon of Ephesus. 
But all this learning is to little purpose: Shakespeare's source 
was, as usual with him, the nearest and most obvious, Brooke's 
English poem, not without a knowledge, however, of the tale 
as related by Painter and Bandello, Thus it is that Painter 
garrulously straggles through the beginnings of a well-known 
story : 

The family of the Capellets . . . was at variance with the Montes- 
ches which was the cause that none of that family repaired to that 
banquet but only the young gentleman, Romeo, who came in a mask 
after supper with certain other young gentlemen. And after they 
had remained a certain space with their vizards on, at length they 
did put off the same. . . . But by means of the torches which 
burned very bright, he was by and by known and looked upon of the 
whole company, but especially of the ladies, for besides his native 
beauty wherewith nature had adorned him, they marvelled at his 
audacity, how he durst presume to enter so secretly into the house of 
that family which had so little cause to do him any good. Notwith- 
standing the Capellets, dissembling their malice, either for the honor 
of the company or else for respect of his youth, did not misuse him 
either in word or deed: by means whereof with free liberty he beheld 
and viewed the ladies at his pleasure, which he did so well and with 
grace so good as there was none but did very well like the presence 
of his person. And after he had particularly given judgment upon 
the excellency of each one according to his affection, he saw one 
gentlewoman amongst the rest of surpassing beauty who (although 
he had never seen her before) pleased him above the rest; and [he] 
attributed unto her in heart the chiefest place for all perfection and 
beauty, and feasting her incessantly with piteous looks, the love which 
he bare to his first gentlewoman [the "unexpressive" Rosaline] was 
overcomen with this new fire that took such nourishment and vigor 
in his heart as he was not able ever to quench the same but by death 
only. 



v 



284 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

But poetry and fiction by no means represent the sole 
varieties of Italian literature translated by Elizabethans. A 
list of "miscellanea," after mention of these, includes nearly 
four hundred numbers and is subdivided into "theology, 
science and the arts, grammars and dictionaries, voyages, 
history and politics, manners and morals." It represents 
works as diverse as Sir Thomas Hoby's excellent translation 
of The Courtier of Castiglione and trifles innumerable, such 
as A Treatise "concerning the use and abuse of dancing," 
and A foyful "Jewel "containing preservatives for the plague." 
Most notable among other Elizabethan translations from 
Italian prose works of importance may be named Fenton's 
version of Guiccardini's J^/^arj- 0/ /ffl/j;, 1579; Macchiavelli's 
Art of War, by Peter Whitehorne, 1573; and the same author's 
Florentine History, translated by Thomas Bedingfield in 1595. 
The Prince, most famous and influential of Macchiavelli's 
works, seems not to have been translated in Shakespeare's 
time. 

/ As to Spanish, after the early vogue of Guevara (whose 
Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius was translated by Lord 
Berners in the reign of Henry VIII), and after the personal 
influence of the Spanish humanist Vives, exerted during his 
residence at Oxford in the same reign, the earliest influence 
of the peninsula upon England was exercised in the transla- 
tions, by such men as Frampton, Thomas, and Nichols, of 
Spanish accounts of exploration and discovery in new lands; 
material in short of the kind later to be arranged and codi- 
fied by Hakluyt himself. A considerable number of Spanish 
religious books were translated too, chiefly of a type heretical 
in their own land. Nor were the mystics and Catholics 
without their translator of the devotional tracts of Fray Luis 
de Granada, the famous Dominican, in Richard Hopkins. 
Sidney and his circle were interested in Spanish; though only 
a couple of the lyrics of the Arcadia are directly traceable to 
the Diana of Montemayor, the story at large shows an ac- 
quaintance with the Spanish pastoral romance. Translations 
of various romances of chivalry, the Amadis de Gaule, Pal- 
mertn d'Oliva, and Palmerin of England, were made by An- 



BORROWINGS FROM FRANCE 285 

thony Munday, with other help, to regale the humbler readers 
of English fiction. These date between 1588, when his 
Palladino of England appeared, and 1619, when Primaleon 
of Greece, "son to Palmerin d'Oliva," concluded the series. 
But by far the most important translation from the Spanish 
was the vigorous and able version of Cervantes' masterpiece 
published by Thomas Shelton in 1612 under the title The 
Delightful History of the Witty Knight, Don Quixote. This 
admirable work, though begun in 1607, was not actually com- 
pleted until 1620. It has received high praise, alike for the 
author's extraordinary grasp of the difficult original and for 
his employment of idiomatic English. 

Turning to France, we find Arthur Hall translating Homer 
from the French in 1581, as North had Englished his Plutarch's 
Lives. Spenser translated Du Bellay and incorporated passages 
derived from the pastorals of Marot in his Shepherds' Calendar; 
Lodge was a notorious borrower from Ronsard, Phillipe des 
Fortes, and other French lyrists; while in the drama. Lady 
Pembroke and Thomas Kyd translated the Antoine and the 
Cornelie of the French Senecan, Robert Garnier. But most 
of these things have already found record and need not further 
delay us. An important, though forgotten, work is Edward 
Grimestone's General Inventory of the History of France, a 
compendium of De Serres, Matthieu, Cayet, and others, pub- 
lished in 1607. Grimestone, whose works are now of the 
greatest scarcity, was a busy translator and compiler, publish- 
ing besides other works a History of the Netherlands in 1608 
and a History of Spain four years later. But if contemporary 
popularity were always the measure of worth, the fame of 
Joshua Sylvester might stand beside that of Spenser, where 
many of his contemporaries placed it, for his translation of 
the scriptural narrative poem. La Semaine, of the Huguenot 
poet Du Bartas. This, Sylvester entitled Du Bartas his 
Divine Week. It appeared in completion in 1606. Sylvester 
emulated the manner of Spenser and was not without his 
influence on William Browne and even on Milton. The 
translator of Du Bartas was a ready versifier, something of a 
concettist, and sustained at all times by a genuine religious 



286 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

enthusiasm. He belongs to the tribe later represented by 
Quarles, and Wither in the uninspired stretches of his reli- 
gious verse. 

Among Elizabethan translations from the French, the 
most famous is Florio's Montaigne. Florio's father was a 

o 

Florentine Protestant who fled from Italy on account of his 
religion. His son John, who was about the age of Spenser, 
was educated at Oxford, enjoyed, like Shakespeare, the literary 
patronage of Southampton, and married a sister of the poet 
Daniel. In the reign of James, Florio became reader in 
Italian to Queen Anne. Florio's Translation of the Essais 
of Montaigne was published in 1603; and while not so accu- 
rate as that of Charles Cotton, 1686, has qualities of individ- 
uality that will insure it a place among the great translations 
of a translating age. The authenticity of the signature of 
Shakespeare in the copy of Florio's Montaigne in the British 
Museum has been called into question. But we may still 
feel sure, from the well-known passage in The Tempest (that 
in which Gonzalo describes an ideal republic), that this was 
one of the books that Shakespeare read. 

But when all has been said, the richest prose product of 
the Elizabethan age, indeed of any age or language, is the 
Authorized Version of the Bible in English. Among the 
thousands of volumes of commentary — religious, antiquarian, 
and philological, — that have been written upon this corner- 
stone of Christianity, but little comparatively has been said until 
of late of its transcedent position as an English classic or of the 
deep and abiding effect which it has worked, whether directly 
or indirectly, upon English prose style; and a feeling, far from 
improper, of awe and reverence has conspired to deter many 
from a treatment of this book as we treat others, although the 
reasonablenss of such a proceeding must be plain to any stu- 
dent of history. The thirty-nine distinct parts of the Old 
Testament and the twenty-seven of the New, form the extant 
literature of a whole people during a period of over a thousand 
years. As such we need not be surprised to find no family 
likeness of parts, either in style, matter, or mode of treatment. 
The Bible contains legend, history, biography, poetry, pro- 



TYNDALE'S "NEW TESTAMENT" 287 

verbs, parables, philosophy, and ethical and political injunc- 
tions. Many of the books are exclusively theological or 
religious, others are purely narrative or lyrical. The Book 
of Job is draniadc^aLleast jn^ihrni. _ With all this diversity 
of subject-matter, the first thing that strikes one in the style 
of the English Bible is the extraordinary quality of its diction 
"remarkable," as it is, "for clearness, simplicity and strength." 
Homely, plain, and Saxon and yet endowed with a dignity, 
a grace and sweetness which may be imitated but never ap- 
proached. So widely is this admirable quality of diction 
acknowledged that the late Cardinal Newman, most erriinent 
of Anglican converts to Roman Catholicism, is reputed to have 
once asked, "Who will say that the uncommon beauty and 
marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the 
greatest strongholds of heresy in this country, ? " 

It is a mistake to consider the Authorized Version as 
.mainly the work of the King James translators in 161 1. As a 
matter of fact the Version was gradually perfected during the 
greater part of the century by a succession of eminent theo- 
logians. The first of these was William Tyndale, a student 
of Greek under Colet and Grocyn at Oxford, later a pupil of 
Erasmus at Cambridge. Tyndale was a man with one idea — 
the translation of the Bible — to the end that the people might 
know Christ from the pure fountain-head. Animated with 
the spirit of Wyclif, he endured "poverty, exile, bitter absence^ 
from friends and innumerable other hard and sharp fightings," 
and finally martyrdom for this great end; for he was burned 
at the stake for his opinions, at Antwerp in 1536. Tyndale's 
New Testament, which differed from all previous translations 
in being made not from the Latin Vulgate but from the original 
Greek, was published in 1525. It was immediately ordered 
suppressed and burned by Archbishop Warham; orders very 
effectively carried out. But Tyndale continued his labors, 
translating parts of the Old Testament which were variously 
published and making a definitive revision of his New Testa- 
ment in 1534. It has been said of Tyndale that he fixed the 
literary style of the Bible. 

In this very year the convocation petitioned the king to 



288 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

authorize a translation of the Bible into English, and Cranmer 
suggested a board of bishops and other learned men to super- 
intend the undertaking. This came to nothing, but Thomas 
Cromwell, then secretary of state, urged Miles Coverdale to 
print a translation on which he had long been engaged, and 
this appeared in 1535, the first complete English Bible, and. 
the first to obtain the right of circulation in England. Cover- 
dale was neither the scholar nor the extreme Protestant diat 
Tyndale had been; his work was chiefly editorial and siiper- 
visory, and it was based on "sundry translations ^not only 
Latin, but also of the Dutch [German] interpreters " and on 
Tyndale. Two revised editions of Coverdale's Bible appeared 
in 1537. In the same year appeared a completion of Tyn- 
dale's work, known as the Mattliews' Bible from the name 
which stands at the end of the dedication, but apparently the 
work of one John Rogers. This work, like Coverdale's, was 
dedicated to King Henry VIII, and furnished with marginal 
comments of a somewhat contentious nature. It was allowed. 
Cromwell again commissioned Coverdale to revise the Bible 
and in 1539 appeared the Great Bible, as it was called, from the 
large size of the volume and its sumptuous character. The 
edition of 1540 contains an Introduction by Cranmer and is 
sometimes known as Cranmer s Bible. Copies of this Bible 
were set up in every church and the services even were deserted 
at times by those eager to read for themselves the word of God. 
Numerous editions of the Great Bible followed in the next 
two years (there were six in 1540 and 1541 alone); and from 
its appearance must be dated that familiar acquaintance with 
the Bible and love of its very word which has since especially 
characterized English speaking people. Another Bible pre- 
cisely contemporary with the Great Bible was the work of an 
Oxford scholar named Richard Taverner, who made some 
valuable corrections in the New Testament, but revised the 
OU mainly by reference to the Vulgate. 

In the reactionary years towards the close of Henry's 
reign the reading of the Bible was forbidden; all Bibles bear- 
ing Tyndale's name were ordered to be destroyed, and Cover- 
dale's New Testament was added to this condemnation. The 



THE "GENEVA" AND THE "BISHOPS' BIBLE" 289 

reign of Edward removed these restrictions and revived the 
publication of the Bible. Though no new version appeared 
in this reign, there were thirteen editions of the Bible com- 
plete, and thirty-five of the New Testament. With the acces- 
sion of Mary, the reaction set in again. Rogers and Cranmer 
Were executed; and Coverdale, now Bishop of Exeter, escaped 
with difficulty overseas, settling at last with other English 
fugitives in Geneva, where Calvin and Beza were holding 
Protestant sway. There Coverdale proceeded with his life 
work of Bible revision. But the greater part of the labor fell 
to younger hands, William Whittingham (who was married 
to Calvin's sister), in collaboration with other English scholars 
completed the work, publishing the Geneva Bible in 1560. 
These revisers were especially aided in their labors by the 
Latin translation of Theodore Beza, the most eminent Biblical 
scholar then living and, as might be expected, their marginal 
commentary was Calvinistic in tone. The Geneva Version 
long remained the popular Bible for home reading and exerted 
no inconsiderable influence on the Authorized Version. 

With the accession of Elizabeth a new official Bible was 
needed; and Archbishop Parker with a group of learned men, 
for the most part dignitaries of the English Church, set about 
a revision of the Great Bible. This was accomplished by 1568 
and is known as the Bishops' Bible: it at once superseded the 
Great Bible in the churches, but was, owing to the method of 
its revision, wanting in uniformity and somewhat uneven in 
execution. The Bishops' Bible by no means supplanted the 
Geneva Version in popular, and especially in Puritan, esteem. 

Although the Romanist's point of view did not favor a 
popular reading of the Scriptures, such was the contemporary 
interest in a knowledge of the book of books that an English 
Bible, neither the work of English bishops nor of Calvinistic 
divines, became a demand of the moment. The preparation 
of this version was naturally given to the English scholars of 
the seminary which had been founded, first at Douay and con- 
tinued later at Rheims (though it returned to Douay) by the 
Jesuits, for the ostensible purpose of bringing about the recon- 
version of England to the Roman faith. The New Testa- 



290 TRANSLATION, VERSE AND PROSE 

ment of the Douay Bible appeared in 1582; but the work was 
not complete until the year 1609. Gregory Martin and other 
Oxford scholars, members of the Society of Jesus, were, in the 
main, responsible for it. This translation was made not from 
the Hebrew and Greek of the original, but from the Latin 
Vulgate on the ground that this was the Bible of Jerome and, 
Augustine and therefore the true version of the Roman Churchr-^ 

Lastly we reach the Authorized Version of 161 1, the Bible 
which served all English speaking Christians (save commu-;> 
nicants of the Church of Rome), until the Revised Version^of 
1 88 1. The scheme of revision, for much of which King 
James must be held personally responsible, included a board 
of some fifty revisers of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and 
involved not only independent work, but frequent consulta- 
tion and comparison. The revisers were instructed that the 
Bishops' Bible was "to be followed, and as little altered as 
the original will permit." Though other versions might be 
used "when they agree better with the text than the Bishops* 
Bible." As a matter of fact the King James revisers had as 
little liberty assigned them as our own recent revisers, and 
they took less. Two features of the Authorized Version were 
its omission of all marginal commentary, and its adoption 
from the Geneva Version of the division of the chapters into 
verses. Another feature was its retention of the ecclesiasti- 
cal terms which Tyndale had violently banished. The supe- 
riority of the Authorized Version over all others in literality, in 
its freedom from sectarian or party zeal, and in literary style 
is beyond dispute or cavil, and no words could exaggerate its 
potent and marvelous influence on English religion and litera- 
ture alike. 

If the question be asked How could such a perfect result 
be brought about under such circumstances ? several reasons 
may be assigned. First, the nature of the original, offering not 
only a subject-matter involving the most interesting of all 
topics but a style in many parts for the equal of which we may 
look in vain through the literatures of the world. Secondly, 
the real piety of the translators and revisers, infusing into them 
a wholesome awe in the prosecution of their great task and a 



THE "AUTHORIZED VERSION" OF THE BIBLE 291 

painstaking care, lest they should impair the truth and beauty 
of the word of God. Third, the state of the English language, — 
that of a vigorous adolescence, alike removed from the stutter- 
ing childhood of multiform Anglo-Saxon and from the conven- 
tional and somewhat trite phraseology that marks every highly- 
lettered tongue. And finally, the character of the age that 
produced Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Spenser, all 
writers, be it remembered, of superlative prose. To expatiate^ 
upon this last point would be to tell the history of the whole 
century; suffice it to say, that it is the age that has not yet 
ceased to believe nor yet begun to conceive itself possessed of 
all knowledge which alone could have produced this inimita- 
ble translatloiroilan^inimitabLe work. 



CHAPTER XVI 

HISTORY, DIVINITY, AND OTHER PROSE OF 
CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

THE opening chapter of this book treated of the literature 
of fact, that more or less literary reflection of past 
tradition that we call history, and present exploit, especially 
in the way of maritime and its attendant military adventure. 
The Elizabethan conception of history as exemplified in the 
pages of Holinshed or Stow is crude in the extreme. It neither 
discriminates nor chooses, but takes whatever has been chron- 
icled before, without hesitancy or question; and it knows no 
ordering of material save the chronological sequence of events. 
But no age could scrutinize and study the past, alike of Eng- 
land and of foreign and ancient nations, as did this age, and 
remain blind to the fatuousness of so childish a handling of 
historical material. Sir Thomas More had already presaged 
better things in his History of Richard III; and Cavendish's 
Life of Wolsey, though more in the nature of memoirs than of 
actual history, is the work of an observer, with his heart in his 
subject and a natural aptitude for direct narrative. Towards 
the end of Elizabeth's reign a conception of history superior 
to that of mere chronicles and annals began to obtain. The 
learned antiquary, William Camden, patron of Ben Jonson,^ 
had already written his Britannia', 1586, in Latin, although it 
was not Englished until Holland's version of 1610. Camden's 
Britannia is not history, but an antiquarian topography of 
Britain. But the ideal of research which such a work involved 
(an ideal which it has been affirmed that Camden derived from 
a brief personal acquaintance with the famous Flemish geog- 
rapher, Abraham Ortelius, who visited England in 1577) 
was something obviously applicable to the pursuit and writing 
of history. Camden's Britannia enjoyed an immediate suc- 
cess, reaching a third edition in 1590 and being reprinted 

292 



SIR JOHN HAYWARD 293 

abroad. His later Annals of Queen Elizabeth, 1615, exempli- 
fied his method, satisfactorily applied to the history of his own 
time, and forms with his Remains concerning Britain, 1605 
(alone of his works first published in English) an honorable 
memorial of one of the most learned and respected scholars 
of his age. As to the method of documentary research in the 
early years of King James, Fulke Greville relates in his Life 
of Sidney that he purposed writing a history of the reign of 
his late queen, Elizabeth, and "adventured to move the secre- 
tary (Sir Robert Cecil) that I might have his favor to peruse 
all obsolete records of the council-chest from those times down 
as near to these as he in his wisdom should think fit." Cecil 
asked this inquirer after historical material to come again in 
three weeks' time, and on this second visit he condescended 
"to question me": 

Why I would dream out any time in writing a story, being as likely 
to rise in this time as any man he knew; then in a more serious and 
friendly manner examining me, how I could clearly deliver many 
things done in that time which may perchance be construed to the 
prejudice of this. I shortly made answer that I conceived a historian 
was bound to tell nothing but the truth, but to tell all truths were both 
justly to wrong and offend not only princes and states, but to blemish 
and stir up against himself the frailty and tenderness, not only of 
particular men but of many families with the spirit of an Athenian 
Timon; and therefore showed myself to be so far from being dis- 
couraged with that objection as I took upon me freely to adventure 
all my own goods in this ship, which was to be of mine own build- 
ing. Immediately this noble secretary . . . seriously assured 
me, that upon second thoughts, he durst not presume to let the council- 
chest lie open to any man living. 

John Hayward, afterwards knighted by King James, was 
born the same year with Shakespeare, dying in 1627, one year 
after Bacon. Educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, 
Hayward rose to a certain distinction as a lavvyer and was 
patronized and encouraged in his historical labors by the king. 
His works begin with a History of the First Tear of Henry 
IV, 1599, which sent him to the Tower for some ill-timed 
flattery of Essex. He wrote, later, the lives of William I, 



294 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

William II, Henry I, and Edward VI, besides Annals (of the 
earlier years) of Queen Elizabeth. Ha3Avard was at one time 
associated as a colleague with Camden in Chelsea College, 
which James had founded. He seems to have caught some- 
what Camden's idea of research and makes in his writings 
a brave show of learning; but from a want of any sense of 
proportion or of criticism, his efforts serve to little purpose. 
Hayward, however, set himself the definite task of rising out 
of the slough of the annalists and chroniclers into something 
like the literary history practised by the ancients. Livy and 
Tacitus thus became his models and he imitates them often 
in that wherein they are least defensible, their rhetoric and 
their formal imaginary oratorical passages. Bacon records 
that Queen Elizabeth inquired of him as to Hayward's "un- 
lucky first attempt" at history, "whether there were no treason 
contained in it." To which Bacon replied: "For treason 
I can not deliver opinion that there is any, but very much 
felony." And when her majesty asked hastily, "How and 
wherein ? I told her the author had committed very apparent 
theft; for he had stolen many of his sentences and conceits 
out of Cornelius Tacitus." 

A minor historian of England was John Speed, the con- 
tinuator of Stow's Chronicle down to the accession of James. 
His History of Great Britain dates l6ll. Daniel, the poet, 
was likewise the author of a lengthy History of England from 
the Conquest to the Reign of Edward HI. But despite his 
abilities as a stylist, Daniel contributed nothing to the ad- 
vancement of the art of historical writing. The greatest piece 
of historical composition of the reigns of Elizabeth and James 
is Bacon's History of Henry VH. In this short essay — for 
it is not much more — the writing of history in English leaps 
with a bound to a place beside Tacitus and Thucydides him- 
self.^ But this was the work of Bacon's latest years and, 
printed in 1621, falls beyond us. 

Among Elizabethan histories of foreign countries it is 
somewhat difficult to distinguish between translators and those 
whose compilations have a greater claim to originality. A 

^ See Spedding, Works of Bacon, vii, 4, 5. 



RALEIGH'S "HISTORY OF THE WORLD" 295 

busy historian, not without a homely merit of his own, was 
Edward Grimestone, already mentioned among translators 
for his compilation of French annals into a portentous volume 
entitled a General Inventory of the History of France, 1607. 
Whether Grimestone's History of the Netherlands, of Spain, 
and other later works that followed, were less completely 
compilations, we are not at present in possession of the facts 
to tell. A more famous work in its day was The General His- 
tory of the Ottoman Turks by Richard Knolles,fellow of Lincoln 
College, Oxford, and later Master of the Grammar School 
at Sandwich. This history was the labor of ten years and 
appeared, elaborately printed with a dedication to the king and 
embellished with "portraits" of the sultans, in 1603. Knolles 
is said to have drawn largely on "a Latin history of the Turks 
published at Frankfort in 1596." His relations to a translation 
of Georgievitz's De Turcarum Morihus by H[enry] Gough in 
1570, entitled The Offspring of the House of the Ottomans, 
might be worthy of inquiry. 

Scarcely less a compilation, but in literary standing and 
quaHty far above these works, is Sir Walter Raleigh's History 
of the World, published in 1614. Written during his twelve 
years' imprisonment in the Tower with a sentence of death 
suspended over his head, this stupendous work is yet con- 
ceived in a spirit of leisure and pervaded with an absorbed 
interest in matters of detail that is simply astounding consid- 
ering the circumstances. Sir Walter Raleigh was born about 
1552, and was thus a year or two older than Spenser whose 
early friend he was. Handsome in person, daring, brilliant, 
and unscrupulous as to the means of attaining success, Raleigh 
became a favorite of the queen, grew rich on monopolies, and 
was spoiled and petted by fortune. He came of the old Devon-^ 
shire stock of sea-dogs and martial heroes. The famous 
navigator. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, was his half-brother. Sir 
Richard Grenville his cousin. Raleigh had fought by land 
against Spain in Ireland and in the Netherlands; and he had 
fought with the Huguenots in France. He had sailed with his 
brother Gilbert in one of his voyages against the commerce 
of Spain, and had helped the Earl of Essex "to singe the Span^ 



^ 



296 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

ish king's beard" at Cadiz. He had fitted out ships for the 
Armada and searched for fabulous El Dorado, burning Spanish 
towns by the way. Imprudence in espousing the claim of the 
Lady Arabella Stuart to the crown brought about the fall of 
this enemy of Spain early in the reign of James; and his con- 
viction of high treason and long imprisonment led to the block 
at last in 16 19. Raleigh's was certainly a strangely romantic 
career; and better perhaps than in greater historic figures 
can we discern in him the contradictions and contrasts that 
make the age of Elizabeth and James so fascinating and in- 
explicable at times. Raleigh was deeply interested in the ex- 
ploitation of England, to his own advantage as well as the 
empire's. But he was likewise a poet possessed of a "lofty 
and insolent vein," scorning the world, its snares and vanities. 
Raleigh had been a friend of Marlowe, and reputed a member 
of a club of atheists, or at least free-thinkers, in his youth; yet 
it was to him that Spenser confided the ethical scheme of his 
ideal of a moral world in The Faery Queen; and The History 
of the World is imbued throughout with a spirit of piety which 
no unbeliever could affect. Raleigh's History has been called 
a stupendous work; it is such not only because of its bulk 
(for there are bulkier Elizabethan works), but because of the 
extraordinary scope of its plan and range of its subject-matter. 
Indeed, the book is less a history than "a series of dissertations 
on law, theology, mythology, magic, war and the ideal form 
of government," illustrated by an exceedingly difi'use account 
of the rise and fall of several of the great empires of the world. 
Raleigh must have had the help of many scholars In the 
assembling of the material at least for this huge mass; and 
Jonson informs us that he had his share in the portion dealing 
with the Punic Wars. But the work, however unequal in 
parts, is governed by the imperative spirit of Raleigh through- 
out, whose eloquence (more particularly in the preface and in 
the celebrated apostrophe to death with which the book ends), 
rises to court comparisons with the best Elizabethan and later 
English prose. 

Into the many admirable prose writings of the age devoted 



STOWS "SURVEY OF LONDON" 297 

to antiquarian studies on the one hand and statecraft, either 
historically considered or in criticism, on the other, it is im- 
possible to enter here. These topics belong from their con- 
temporary conditions less to the domain of the literature of 
power than to that of the literature of knowledge, and although 
often conceived in a spirit of broad and philosophical gener- 
alization, are limited none the less by the occasions that pro- 
duced them. During the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth 
an informal society of antiquarians existed, founded by Arch- 
bishop Parker; its ruling spirits were Camden, Speed, Selden, 
and Cotton. Of the first two we have just heard; John Sel- 
den, born in 1584, was the most learned of legal antiquaries. 
His great work was The History of Tithes, published in 16 18. 
Selden was also a noted wit; but his Table Talk was mostly 
the gathering of his later years. It was in 1598 that Sir 
Thomas Bodley, a diplomat of note, made his offer to found a 
library in the University of Oxford; this was accepted and 
the library formally opened in 1602. Sir Robert Bruce Cot- 
ton was an enthusiast in the collection of old manuscripts. He 
published no more than a history of The Reign of Henry HL, 
and this in 1627. But most of his extraordinary hoard of old 
documents were acquired during the later years of Elizabeth's 
reign and the earlier of James. There are no more imperish- 
able memorials of the love of learning in the age of Shakespeare 
than the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Cottonian Manu- 
scripts of the British Museum. Among Elizabethan anti- 
quaries none has maintained so popular a reputation and one 
so thoroughly deserved in his local field as John Stow, the 
chronicler and the antiquarian of old London. Stow was 
originally a tailor, but was led by a passion for his subject to 
minute and personal research among the antiquities and mon- 
uments of London and to write a book, absolutely unparalleled 
in its kind. Stow's Survey of London was first printed in 1598 
and is the starting-point of all inquiry into the subject of Eliz- 
abethan and earlier London. Stow is so intent on his subject 
that he tells it well, unconscious of his force and directness. 
Like his fellow chroniclers Stow takes whatever is to his hand 



298 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

in the work of his predecessors, content that he be meted a Hke 
measure by those that come after. Stow has been pillaged 
assuredly for far more than he ever borrowed. 

Singularly gifted and versatile was Sir Henry Wotton, a 
Kentish gentleman, younger kinsman of Bacon and a personal 
friend of Donne whom he met at New College, Oxford. Wot- 
ton was much abroad in the service of the state and his breadth 
of spirit in politics as in religion made him at once capable 
of intimacy with scholars such as Isaac Casaubon, with whom 
he lived at Geneva, and with Cardinals Bellarmine and Allen 
at Rome. Wotton was esteemed and trusted by King James; 
and his devoted attachment to the service of his sovereign's 
daughter, the beautiful and unhappy Elizabeth, Queen of 
Bohemia, was the romance of his life. On his retirement from 
diplomatic life in 1624, Wotton became Provost of Eton. His 
literary work embraces a History of the Republic of Venice, a 
Life of Donne, and a Treatise on Angling, all of these only 
projected however, although the last two were carried out by 
Wotton's friend and biographer, Izaak Walton. Wotton's 
most important work in his day was his treatise on The State 
of Christendom, printed in 1637, towards the close of his life. 
The Reliquice WottoniancB, published in 1 65 1, includes topics 
as various as The Elements of Architecture, A Survey of Ed- 
ucation, the "Characters" of two or three historical personages. 
Letters, Aphorisms, and a few poems, two or three of which 
— amons them the fine lines to the Princess Elizabeth be- 
ginning "You meaner beauties of the night" — gained a lasting 
and deserved celebrity. Wotton, like Selden and Bacon, had 
the gift of putting things. He was possessed, too, of a deli- 
cate critical taste for poetry. It was Wotton who first 
enthusiastically approved Comus; and it is fitting that this 
chivalrous, scholarly, and capable man should live forever 
in Walton's fine biography. 

Such writings as these of Wotton and many like them of 
less conspicuous literary merit are best described under a 
generic title such as the prose of contemporary comment; 
for the conditions of the moment begot them and, while they 
rise in dignity of subject-matter and in care of composition 



WRITINGS ON EDUCATION 299 

above the grade of mere pamphleteering, their interest to us 
must remain curious and historical rather than strictly literary. 
Thus Richard Mul caster, first Master^of the Merchant Tailors -===> 
School, wrote originally and eloquently in his Positions con- 
cerning the Training up of Children, in 1581, and showed him- 
self a worthy successor of Ascham and Elyot in a subject which 
we now call pedagogy and dignify with many technical and 
professional difficulties. In Mulcaster's book and in John 
Brinsley's Ludus Literarius, 1612, will be found many a new 
idea, grown old to be rediscovered by the historically unin- 
formed of our own discovering age. The education of the 
young has always been an absorbing theme to pedagogues and 
parents. Even the great Lord Burleigh turned aside from the 
cares of practical statecraft to pen, in admirably phrased and 
unadorned English, Ten Precepts to his Son wherein such 
apothegms as "Marry thy daughters in time lest they marry 
, themselves," and "He that payeth another man's debts seeketh 
his own decay" disclose his kinship in blood, as in worldly 
sagacity, to his great nephew, Francis Bacon. It was in the 
year of the Armada, before any certain work of Shakespeare's, 
that Dr. Timothy Bright, physician to St. Bartholomew's Hos- 
jppital, set forth a little book called Charactery: An Art of Short, 
\Swift and Secret Writing by Character, and thus founded the 
modern art of stenography. Many a "spurious quarto" of 
Shakespeare's and others' plays doubtless owes much to the 
art of Dr. Timothy Bright. A more professional work of the 
same author was his Treatise on Melancholy, 1 586, by some 
supposed to have suggested Robert Burton's famous Anatomy 
of Melancholy published in 1621. 

Attention has been specifically called of late to a remarkable 
series of state documents concerning Ireland, among them 
Sidney's defense of his father's administration as viceroy, 
Spenser's dialogue, and later papers and reports by Bacon, 
Sir John Davies, Fynes Moryson, and Sir Thomas Stafford. 
It is interesting to think of some of these men whom we remem- 
ber chiefly for their poetry, as taking their part in government 
and practising, often with consummate success, the difficult 
art of statecraft. Spenser's work is written in dialogue form 



300 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

and is entitled A View of the State of Ireland. It was licensed 
in 1598, and is a dear and direct piece of prose writing based 
upon knowledge and remarkably well arranged and handled. 
In Certain Considerations touching the Plantation in Ireland, 
1609, Bacon is critical of the administration of the time. Sir 
John Davies, in his Discovery of the State of Ireland , 16 1 3, 
contributes a history of the country, which he supplemented, 
in 1617, with an account of the Tyrone rebellion. More per- 
sonal in nature and for the most part well below the literary 
level are the several diarists, among them the celebrated astrol- 
oger, Dr. John Dee, who calculated an auspicious day for 
Queen Elizabeth's coronation and long outlived her; Sir 
Robert Naunton, who racily sketched in his Fragmenta Re- 
galia, her favorites; and Robert Carey, later Earl of Mon- 
mouth, who tells in lively narrative how he carried the news 
of the old queen's death to her eagerly expectant successor. 
To two diaries, that of John Manninghamofthe Middle Tem- 
ple and that of the quack physician and astrologer, Dr. Simon 
Forman, a peculiar interest attaches, as each affords us con- 
temporary record of the performances of plays of Shakespeare. 
The notes which the Scottish poet, William Drummond of 
Hawthornden, made concerning the life, opinions, and literary 
gossip of Ben Jonson, who visited him in 1619, offer us the best 
contemporary picture of Shakespeare's greatest literary com- 
petitor. It is fair to remember that these Notes of Conversa- 
tions of Ben Jonson were neither published nor intended for 
publication by Drummond; but were rescued from oblivion 
generations after the Scottish poet's death. The Autobiography 
of Sir James Melville, the diplomat, deals at large with the 
history of Scotland as the Diary of his namesake, the reformer, 
deals with the Scottish church in his time. Both works were 
published posthumously and are of greater literary preten- 
sions than the fragments just enumerated. 

Several controversies, more or less literary in nature, have 
found mention above. Besides the Marprelate dispute, so 
drastically suppressed, and the personal literary duel between 
Harvey and Nash, there was the old academic question of 
classical verse as the vehicle of English poetry, and the long 



SCOTT'S "DISCOVERY OF WITCHCRAFT" 301 

Puritan attack on the stage and on social abuses. Another 
controversy, involving more serious consequences than any 
matter of opinion, was the semi-religious question involved in 
the Elizabethan belief in witches. In 1584 Reginald Scott— ^ 
put forth an elaborate and learned work entitled The Discovery 
of Witchcraft. Scott was a Kentish esquire and justice of the 
peace, and left behind him a practical little treatise on the 
staple of Kent, entitled The Hop Garden, 1574. It was in 
the exercise of his official duties that Scott was drawn into an 
appreciation of the enormities and injustice that frequently 
resulted from the popular notions concerning witchcraft; and 
he entered heart and soul into the question on this impetus, 
and with a large mass of writings on the subject (such as those 
of Bodin and Weier) before him. But Scott was ahead of his 
time. He was denounced with singular unanimity by the 
clergy; and King James, who was something of a connoisseur 
in witches himself, so far condescended in his zeal as to answer 
this heretic with his royal hand in his Demonology, 1597, 
wherein he pronounced the opinions of Scott "damnable." 
This excursion of King James into demonology was by no 
means his only publication. He had taken part, when a lad 
and still under the supervision of his tutors, in the discussions 
about poetry that belonged to the days of Sidney, in his Essays 
of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poetry, 1 584. And a few 
years later, in 1589, he displayed the interest in theology that 
he maintained throughout his life in Meditations on Revela- 
tions. The Basilikon Doron, 1599, is a book of advice to his 
son, crowded with marginal references to the classics and the 
Bible, for James was nothing if not pedantic. Although it is 
fair to add that even in this James was not conspicuous ac- 
cording to the learned fashion of his day — or of ours, if the 
truth be confessed. As to the wise saws and modern instances 
of this book, it has been remarked that they might have come 
with better grace from a monarch less a victim to favoritism. 
But few authors can stand the test of judgment by the conduct 
of their livet.. Two opinions of this royal author stand forth 
in relief: his absolute faith in the divine right of kings, set 
forth in several treatises; and his hatred of the new-fangled 



302 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

habit of smoking, denounced in A Counterblast to Tobacco, 
1604. As to his controversy with Scott, on his accession to 
the throne James took a thorough means of silencing his adver- 
sary by ordering every copy of The Discovery of Witchcraft 
to be burnt. Happily for Scott, he died a subject of Queen 
Elizabeth. 

Still another class of books based on contemporary ex- 
periences, and of the greatest possible interest to the student 
of manners and of the past, is that reported in the several 
records which Elizabethan travelers by land into foreign parts 
have left of their journeys and observations. The earliest of 
these travelers was Fynes Moryson, a gentleman of Lincoln- 
shire and student at Cambridge, who obtained a license to 
travel in 1 589; and, two years later, started on a series of jour-, 
neys that took him not only through the more important parts 
of western Europe but to Copenhagen, Danzig, and Cracow, 
and then to Cyprus, Jerusalem, and Constantinople. Mory- 
son was an observant and leisurely traveler. It was his custom 
to reside in a place to become acquainted with it. He thus 
lived at one time, a student at the University of Leyden, so- 
journed for months in Rome, studying antiquities under the 
protection of the English Cardinal Allen;- while so long was 
his stay in Constantinople, he tells us, that he had contracted 
the habit — necessary for his protection among the Turks — of 
keeping his eyes fixed upon the ground and never looking a man 
in the face. Like a true traveler, Moryson was interested in 
everything: polity, manners, national traits, methods of trans- 
portation, architecture, diet, apparel, and foreign coinages. 
And he was possessed of the industry, requisite to a careful- 
chronicling of all that he saw, and a homely clarity and direct- 
ness of expression, not unillumined at times with an appreci- 
ative sense of humor. Moryson wrote up his Itinerary (as it 
was finally called on publication in 16 17) no less than three 
times; first in Latin, secondly translated, and lastly abbre- 
viated. The work is, from its mass of detail, of enormous 
length and the last of its three parts remains unreprinted and 
partly even now in manuscript. Earlier therefore in print 
was Thomas Coryate with his Crudities Hastily Gobbled Up, 



BOOKS OF TRAVEL 303 

161 1, the account of the author's travels a year or two previous, 
mainly in France and Italy. Coryate, after failure to obtain 
his degree at Oxford, became a species of privileged buffoon 
at court v^here he affected w^himsicality of appearance, speech, 
and manner, and rivaled in repute "Archie" Armstrong 
whom Jonson called "the principal fool of the state." From 
Coryate's character and from the enormous mass of semi- 
ironical prefatory matter in commendation of the author and 
his work which he procured at the hands of his many friends, 
Coryate's Crudities might be supposed to be wholly a book of 
fictitious foolery. Such however is far from the case. Coryate 
tells, for the most part, a plain unvarnished tale, by no means 
wanting in interest, despite the fact that his ways have been 
so much traveled since his time. Coryate started on a second 
tour in 16 12, visiting Constantinople, Damascus, and Aleppo 
and going thence by caravan to Ispahan and Lahore, and visit- 
ing the Great Mogul, by whom he was kindly received. But 
of this journey we know only by a brief report of Purchas. 
Coryate lost his life by fever at Surat in 1617 Of less interest 
is the narrative entitled The Total Discourse of the Rare Ad- 
ventures andrainful Perigrinations of William Lithgow first 
published in 1614 and detailing an extension of Coryate's first 
journey to Jerusalem and Cairo. Lithgow likewise went 
abroad again and, although his life was saved by the inter- 
vention of an English consul, it was not until he had endured 
torture on the rack at the hands of the Inquisition in Spain for 
his Protestantism. Lithgow's style, like that of Coryate is, 
at times, affected and absurdly precious. But to speak of 
either of these writers as Euphuistic is to obscure the signi- 
ficance of words. The last of the travelers to write within 
the lifetime of Shakespeare was George Sandys, paraphraser 
in verse of parts of the Bible and translator of Ovid at a later 
time when he was secretary to the governor of the colony of 
Virginia. Sandys' Relation of a 'Journey begun A. D. 1610 
was published in 16 15 and is the clear and unaffected narrative 
of a man of breeding who traveled neither in the adventurous 
spirit of Coryate nor as the vagabond that Lithgow was com- 
pelled to become. Sandys enjoyed peculiar advantages while 



304 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

in Jerusalem, seeing many things denied to other travelers, 
among them "the dwelling of Zebedee, the sycamore on which 
Judas hanged himself, the 'Castle of Lazarus,' and the vault 
from which he was raised, the house of Simon the Leper, the 
fount where Bathsheba bathed her feet, the palace of Pilate, 
and the convent to which the Magdalen retired from the van- 
ities of the world." With the tomb of Juliet still on view at 
Verona and the many curiosities of "Shakespeare" — to men- 
tion none other — to be seen at Stratford and elsewhere, let 
no one cast a stone at the credulity of either Sandys or other 
of these Elizabethan "sight-seers." 

Two examples of the prose of contemporary comment, 
very diverse in their natures, have been reserved for a some- 
what fuller treatment. These are Greville's Life of Sidney 
and Jonson's Timber or Discoveries. Both were posthumous 
publications, and both these men have already been considered 
elsewhere and in other connections. Sir Fulke Greville, v/ho 
received from James at his coronation Warwick Castle and 
was years afterwards raised to the peerage as Lord Brooke, is 
best remembered as the early friend of Sidney and the one 
among the "favorites" of Queen Elizabeth who (doubtless 
due to his own prudence) suffered least from the royal changes 
of temper. Greville's literary repute is at least three-fold; 
for his lyrics of intellectualized emotion, for his singularly 
difficult Senecan dramas, and for his poetical treatises on 
statecraft. To these we must add his writings in prose, 
chiefly represented in the Life of Sidney and in A Letter to an 
Honorable Lady. The latter is really a disquisition in the 
abstract on marriage for love. It was never sent, nor indeed 
addressed, to any real person; but is deeply interesting and 
full of profundity of thought. The Life of Sidney is not a bi- 
ography at all, but appears to have been intended as a species 
of autobiographical preface to Greville's collected works, illus- 
trating less the outward happenings of his life than his relations 
to the two beings whom he most loved and revered, Sidney, 
the friend of his youth, and his "incomparable queen," Eliza- 
beth. In the course of a narrative that wanders whither the 
author will, guided by associations and recollections often 



GREVILLE'S "LIFE OF SIDNEY" 305 

irrecoverable to-day, Greville expresses himself on many sub- 
jects on which he had pondered in the course of a long and ac- 
tively useful public life. His reading must have been wide, yet 
he is strangley unaffected either by the erudition or the liter- 
ature of his time, A more completely metaphysical mind than 
Greville's it would be difficult to discover. He was a Stoic 
in an age of Platonism, a theorist in statecraft among poli- 
ticians. He is full of Macchiavelian subtlety and insight, but 
stands aloof from argument, controversy, and all practical 
applications. Consciousness of the gauds and ornaments of 
rhetoric as such he knows not at all; and yet the very essence 
of poetry and of beauty of expression is his at times, not only in 
his verse but in his prose as well. Fluency is the quality that 
is furthest from the thought as from the style of Greville. 
What he says, he says with gravity, with a certain hesitant 
difficulty; and he abounds in indirections of speech and sen- 
teinces in which we wander with him as in a maze. But there 
is certainly (if we will but seek it) a significance, depth, and 
beauty in the thought of Greville that make it worth the labor 
of attainment and that come to exercise on him who learns 
to know him a peculiar fascination. The comparison which 
has been made of Greville to Polonius, with his pedantic 
parade of shallow, hackneyed truisms, and his incessant bab- 
ling to no purpose, seems peculiarly unhappy. King James 
with his Basilikon Doron — the advice of Polonius to his son 
written in large and in all seriousness — King James is Polo- 
nius; not Greville, whose lofty preoccupation with abstract 
truth and search therefor, together with a certain awkwardness 
of style, despite his power to express a beautiful thought in apt j 
and fitting raiment, seem qualities more in common with our 
American Emerson. 

Ben Jonson's Timber or Discoveries made upon Men and 
Matter was gathered with other material at the end of the 
second folio of the poet's collected works, 1641. The book 
has been called a "species of commonplace book of aphorisms 
flowing out of the poet's daily reading." But it is also much 
more. For although many passages are all but literal trans- 
lations, culled from the classics or from medieval or contem- 



f~ 



306 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

porary Latin and other authors, every note is stamped with the 
powerful personality of Jonson and penned with the utmost 
care as to details of expression and style. Moreover, other 
entries are not literary but allusive to Jonson's contemporaries 
or expressions of his estimate of them. Such are the famous 
passages concerning "Shakespeare nostrati" (our country- 
man), as Jonson calls him in pride, and the one on Bacon and 
his eloquence. Jonson esteemed both men and noted his 
regard in unaffected terms. Of Bacon his words are: 

My conceit of his person was never increased towards him by 
place or honors. But I have and do reverence him for the greatness 
that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his 
work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that 
had been in many ages. 

As to Shakespeare, Jonson draws nearer the man himself in 
the memorable words: "For I loved the man, and do honor 
his memory on this side idolatry as much as any." 

Religious and devotional writings form a very considerable 
proportion of the total output of the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
press. Apart from the revision and innumerable editions of_ 
the Bible and the various adaptations, translations, and para- 
phrases into which it was wrought in parts by the devout, apart 
too, from the English Prayer Book and other manuals and 
rituals of devotion, the mass of controversial "literature" 
which was begotten first of the break with Rome, and secondly 
by the schism that arrayed Anglican and Puritan in two hostile 
camps, was legion, even if now as dead as the herd of swine, . 
possessed of devils, that cast themselves into the sea at Gad- 
arene. Divinity, employing literary art, as it must only for 
an ulterior purpose, is all but wholly of the literature of knowl- 
edge, however it may wing its words with poetry or glow with 
the passion of faith. Moreover, theological writing fliore 
completely than any other form of prose is contemporary in 
its purpose and tethered to the conditions of the moment. 
For even when the religious principles involved are of the 
widest significance and application, the theology of one age 
needs commonly to be translated in terms of the next, and 



WORKS OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY 307 

Issues that have once seemed momentous, creeds for which 
men laid down their lives, are no more to generations that 
come after than remote, jagged rocks that break the monotony 
of a level horizon. 

The battle royal of new and militant English Protestantism 
against the Church of Rome in matters ceremonial and dog- 
matic had been fought out mostly by those who survived, if 
at all, not far into the reign of Elizabeth. Sir Thomas More 
and Erasmus were agreed with the reformers as to the existence 
of abuses within the church; but the controversy of the former 
with Tyndale pivoted on the question, could the church be 
reformed from within and survive. It is better to think of 
Tyndale as the first of the devoted scholars that gave their time 
to the translation of our English Bible than to recall in him the 
bitter controversialist, attacking The Practices of Prelates. 
And it is better to remember Cranmer, first Protestant Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, as the artistic.form-giver tothe beautiful 
diction of the Book of Common Prayer, than for his voluminous 
and now forgotten writings on the eucharistic and other con- 
troversies that shook the theological structures of the time. 

We may pass over the intervening decades of minor con- 
troversy in which figured the once potent names of Whitgift, 
Rainolds, Featley, Andrews, and Field. Towards the close 
of Elizabeth's reign the religious equilibrium which she 
had so long contrived to maintain was rendered unstable, 
first by the activities of the Jesuits in their endeavors to win 
back England to the faith of Rome; and secondly, by the mil- 
itant attitude of Puritanism. . Among the many Roman Cath- 
olics of English birth who took their part in the pamphlet war- 
fare of the time may be named Thomas Stapleton, prominent 
during the nineties in the counsels of the English college, founded 
by the Jesuits at Douay, and the author, amongst much else, 
of a History of the English Church and an Apology for Philip 
II as against Elizabeth. A more notable man in the England 
of his time was Robert Parsons, who came back to his native 
country, about 1580, an accredited missionary from the Vatican 
to carry on innumerable intrigues and to write innumerable 
pamphlets in the cause of his church. His little volume of 



3o8 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

Christian exercises, entitled A Christian Directory, enjoyed 
an extraordinary vogue. Among many, perhaps the most 
conspicuous reply to the Roman Catholic position in later 
Elizabethan years was John Rainolds' De Romance Ecclesice 
Idolatria, 1 596. 

Although the attack on Rome and Romish "practices" 
continued almost unabated, long before the time when such 
men as Rainolds began to write, Puritanism had arisen and 
with it new issues and contentions. The Renaissance had 
stood for individualism, and individualism fostered the ideals 
of nationality; the Protestant idea went further to give to each 
people its national church. But it was felt that the world had 
lost something in thus sacrificing the ambitious ideal of Rome : 
a world united in a universally accepted faith, under one su- 
preme and apostolic head, who stood in spiritual power above 
princes as princes stood temporarily above common men. It 
was at this juncture that John Calvin conceived his ingenious 
plan of a Christian republic which a happy train of circum- 
stances enabled him to put into practice with triumphant suc- 
cess at Geneva. Calvin's reorganization of the church in re- 
lation to the state found its basis in the Christian man "elected 
and called of God, preserved by his grace from the power of 
sin, predestinate to eternal life." "Every such Christian man 
is in himself a priest, and every group of such men is a church, 
self-governing, independent of all save God, supreme in its 
authority over all matters ecclesiastical and spiritual." With- 
out entering into the details of Calvin's nice balance of power, 
by which administration, election, interpretaion of Scripture, 
decision of doctrine, discipline, and even excommunication, 
all are provided for within the congregation, it is sufficient to 
note this most important corollary: "To this discipline princes 
as well as common men are alike subject; princes as well as 
common men must take their doctrine from the ministers of 
the church." Calvin was at one with the Church of Rome 
in thus setting up a spiritual and ecclesiastical supremacy over 
all political and national claims. But "the Pope of Geneva" 
was not the same as the Pope of Rome. On the other hand, 
Calvin was at variance with the political and social systems of 



RICHARD HOOKER 309 

every nation of Europe in placing the ultimate source of power" 
neither in prince, parliament, nor people, but in the individual 
Christian man; for, however despotic might seem the Calvin- 
istic idea of the authority of pastor and elder, both aHke were 
subject, in the last resort, to the vote of the congregation. How 
deeply the "exiles" from England drank of the Calvinistic 
font must be clear to the most careless reader of history. The 
new Puritan idea was alike counter to the ideals of a national 
and established chunch and to any monarchical form of govern- 
ment. That this idea should ultimately have led to armed 
conflict with both church and state was in the very nature of 
things. But with these larger issues we are not here concerned. 
One service Calvinism assuredly rendered mankind in its 
recognition of the individual man and his place as a political 
and social unit at the basis of modern democracy. ' 

It was these essential doctrines of Puritanism, with the 
innumerable other points in which the Calvinistic interpreta- 
tion of Christianity fell into variance with the tenets of the 
Church of England, that Richard Hooker set himself to 
refute in The Laws of Ecclesmstical Polity, four books of which 
appeared in 1594, the other three posthumously in 1648 and 
■1662. The literary attacks of Martin Marprelate on the 
bishops^and on what, from the Puritan point of view, was 
regarde'd as a usurpation of power, preceded Hooker; and they 
have already received attention above in our consideration 
of the popular pamphlet literature. Hooker substituted, 
in this warfare between the opposing forces of Puritan and 
Anglican, coolness and circumspection for passion and abuse,- 
a consideration of the question on the basis of principle and 
general law for personality, recrimination, and scurrility, and 
in so doing definitively stated the position of the Church of 
England at the end of Elizabeth's reign. 

Richard Hooker was humbly born at Heavitree, near 
Exeter, in 1554. He was from the first a student of extraor- 
dinary precocity and industry; and, attracting the attention 
of Jewell, Bishop of Salisbury, went up to Oxford where, as 
one of the fellows of Corpus Christi College, he gained an 
unusual repute for his learning and piety. Hooker took 



310 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

orders in 1581; and four years after was appointed, through 
the influence of Archbishop Whitgift, Master of the Temple. 
It was here that Hooker, much against his will, was drawn 
into a theological controversy with Walter Travers, who was 
afternoon lecturer in the Temple, and who maintained Pres- 
byterian views concerning church government with great ardor. 
As Fuller put it, the pulpit of the Temple "spake pure Canter- 
bury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon, " — a condi- 
tion of affairs that soon became intolerable. _ Hereupon the 
archbishop intervened and, on a technicality, forbade Travers 
to preach, a move that helped neither the bishops' cause nor 
improved the temper of Travers,who continued the controversy 
(now become hopelessly personal) in print. Hooker replied, 
defending himself especially against the charge of latitudi- 
narianism. But he was heartily sick of controversy and be- 
sought his patron to remove him from the Temple to a quiet 
retreat in the country. This he at length found in the living 
of Boscombe, near Salisbury, and it was there that, pondering 
in peace on the questions so raised in the heat of controversy. 
Hooker projected and wrote his life-work. The Laws of Eccle- 
siastical Polity. In 1595 Hooker was translated to the better- 
living of Bishopsbourne in the neighborhood of Canterbury, 
where he died towards the close of the year 1600. 

In person Hooker has been described by Walton as mean 
in stature, insignificant in appearance and address, and 
conducting himself at all times "so as to give no occasion of 
evil, but ... in much patience in afflictions, in an- 
guishes, in necessities, in poverty and no doubt in long suffering; 
yet troubling no man with his discontents and wants. " While 
it has been suspected that Walton, like the true literary artist 
that he was, overrated the insignificance of the personality of 
Hooker that he might heighten the contrast with his brilliancy 
of mind and argumentative power, it is certain that Hooker 
was a man of impoverished vitality, shrinking from an active 
contact with life, and singularly dependent on the good offices 
of others — which seem to have been offered him unsought 
— in the ordinary affairs of life. According to the often 
related story of Walton, on the suggestion made by a kindly- 



"ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY" 311 

disposed matron that he needed a wife, Hooker commissioned 
her to find him one. And the matron provided for him "her 
daughter Joan, who brought him neither beauty nor portion; 
for her conditions," continues Walton, "they were too Hke 
that wife's which is by Solomon compared to a dripping house; 
so that the good man had no reason to rejoice in the wife 
of his youth. " Walton completes his picture with a descrip- 
tion of a visit paid Hooker by two of his pupils. They found 
him "with a book in his hand" tending "his small allotment 
of sheep in a common field; which he told his pupils he was 
forced to do then, for that his servant was gone home to dine 
and assist his wife to do some necessary household duties. 
But when his servant returned and released him, then his 
two pupils attended him unto his house, where their best 
entertainment was his quiet company which was presently 
denied them; for Ricjiard was called to rock the cradle." 

The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity comprehends an exhaus- 
tive explanation and justification of the theological position 
of the Church of England, between the Puritan who claimed 
the Bible for his sole and exclusive authority, and the Roman 
Catholic to whom the authority of the church stood above 
. all. In the first book Hooker endeavored to explain the 
philosophical position of the Church of England and to make 
clear its place as an institution in the universal scheme. The 
second book takes issue with the Puritan assumption that the 
Bible contains all the law and all guidance in things spiritual 
and temporal that can be needed by the Christian man; while 
the third denies the Calvinistic assumption that a form of 
church government is prescribed in the Scriptures or is even 
discoverable in them. The fourth book contests the charge 
that the ceremonies of the Church of England are in any 
wise popish; and the fifth is concerned with an exhaustive 
vindication of that church as to the minuter attacks of the 
Puritans. In the sixth book Hooker turns from defense to 
attack the Presbyterian system of church government; the 
seventh correspondingly attempts a vindication of Episcopacy; 
while the last explains and defends the doctrine of royal 
supremacy in the church. 



312 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

Whatever Hooker's suggested debts to the theological 
system of the Spanish theologian, Suarez, or to Thomas 
Aquinas, for comprehensiveness of design and admirable 
quality of detail the Ecclesiastical Polity must be pronounced 
a v^ork deserving the highest praise. Despite much dialectic 
skill and an unquestionable integrity of purpose, it can not 
be said that Hooker is either a clear or an accurate reasoner. 
His fairness of attitude and moderation of spirit, hov^ever, 
make him peculiarly the man to have set forth the position of 
the church of compromise. Hooker is above all things schol- 
arly and literary, but singularly free, vs^ith all his learning, 
from the slightest trace of pedantry and the scholar's darling 
sin in his age, the overplus of quotation. Hooker's style, too, 
is devoid of literary affectations or the slightest strife after 
rhetorical effect; and yet he is again and again effectively 
eloquent where the current of his argument hurries him into 
the rapids of similitude. Attention has been called to the 
purely bookish nature of Hooker's figures and illustrations. 
It may be doubted if a figure drav^n from nature or a personal 
observation of man can be found from cover to cover of the 
Ecclesiastical Polity, as it may be doubted if this meek and 
shrinking scholar ever made an independent observation on 
the visible things of this v^orld in his life. And yet there is 
something estimable about both the man and his v^ork. We 
do not, it is true, return to The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 
— unless v^e be churchmen — with the pleasure which 
attracts us to the witching phrase and sly humor of Hooker's 
biographer, worthy Isaak Walton; but we feel that Hooker 
has written a surprisingly permanent book when we consider 
his theme, and one alike an honor to his wide theological 
learning, his integrity of mind, and his power to compel 
language into the artistic mold of thought. Hooker is one 
of the great English prose stylists, fortunate that in his lifetime 
his vine-like nature, that needed always the prop of patronage 
to sustain it, was so sustained as to produce a great book. 
Hooker has been even more fortunate posthumously, as few 
authors have been more constantly and consistently over- 
praised. The familiar grouping of his name with Spenser's, 



"ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY" 313 

Shakespeare's, and Bacon's is preposterous, because Hooker's 
talents are reconstructive and, in no primary sense, creative; 
and because the field w^hich he tilled so fruitfully was, after 
all, but a little plot of ground. 

It is difficult to quote from a work such as Hooker's; 
but perhaps this passage will disclose, as well as an extract can, 
the unaffectedness of his diction, its impersonality and effective 
rhetoric. 

The bounds of wisdom are large, and within them much is con- 
tained. Wisdom was Adam's instructor in Paradise; wisdom endued 
the fathers, who lived before the law, with the knowledge of holy 
things; by the wisdom of the law of God, David attained to excel 
others in understanding; and Solomon likewise to excel David by the 
selfsame wisdom of God — teaching him many things besides the 
law. The ways of well-doing are, in number, even as many as are 
the kinds of voluntary actions, so that whatsoever we do in this 
world and may do it ill, we show ourselves therein by well-doing to 
be wise. Now, if wisdom did teach men by Scripture not only all the 
ways that are right and good in some certain kind, according to that 
of St. Paul concerning the use of Scripture, but did simply, without 
any manner of exception, restraint, or distinction, teach every way 
of doing well, there is no art but Scripture should teach it, because 
every art doth teach the way how to do something or other well. To 
teach men therefore wisdom professeth, and to teach them every 
good way, but not every good way by one way of teaching. What- 
soever either man on earth or the angels of heaven do know, it is as 
a drop of that unemptiable fountain of wisdom; which<widsom hath 
diversely imparted her treasures unto the world. As her ways are 
of sundiy kinds, so her manner of teaching is not merely one and the 
same. Some things she openeth by the sacred books of Scripture, 
some things by the glorious works of nature; with some things she 
inspireth them from above by spiritual influence, in some things she 
leadeth and traineth them only by worldly experience and practice. 
We may not so in any one special kind admire her, that we disgrace 
her in any other, but let all her ways be according unto their place 
and degree adored. 

Vastly in contrast with a style such as this Is the personal 
note, with which the following passage from one of Donne's 



314 PROSE OF CONTEMPORARY COMMENT 

sermons opens, and the vivid and ingenious imagery that 
succeeds: 

If I should inquire upon what occasion God elected me, and writ 
my name in the book of life, I should sooner be afraid that it were 
not so, than find a reason why it should be so. God made sun and 
moon to distinguish seasons, and day and night, and we cannot have 
the fruits of the earth but in their seasons; but God hath made no 
decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; in Paradise, the fruits 
were ripe the first minute, and in heaven it is always autumn, his 
mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask our daily bread, and God 
never says you should have come yesterday. He never says you must 
come again to-morrow, but to-day if ye will hear his voice, to-day he 
will hear you. If some king of the earth have so large an extent of 
dominion in north and south, as that he hath winter and summer 
together in his dominions, so large an extent east and west as that he 
hath day and night together in his dominions, much more hath God 
mercy and judgment together; he brought light out of darkness, not 
out of a lesser light; he can bring thy summer out of winter, though 
thou have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, 
or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, 
clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupi- 
fied till now, now God comes to thee, not as the dawning of the day, 
not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon, to illustrate 
all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries: all occasions 
invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons. 

Donne, the man and the poet, w^ill claim us in a chapter 
to come. He had been much engaged in theological studies 
and writing before he took orders in 1615. As reader in 
divinity at Lincoln's Inn up to 1619, and as Dean of St. Paul's 
between 1 62 1 and ten years later, Donne became a famous 
preacher and nearly two hundred sermons, some of them more 
like treatises for their length and elaboration, attest his zeal, 
his extensive learning and eloquence in this field of his final 
choice. The originality, the subtlety, intellectuality, and 
fanciful wit of the poet Donne, all are present in these remark- 
able discourses, transfigured by the steady light of a passionate 
religious conviction such as only those who have once travailed 
in the ways of the world can truly feel. But the Sermons of 
Donne, like the voluminous Contemplations of Hall (begun 



MINOR THEOLOGIANS AND PULPITERS 315 

in 1612), fall for the most part beyond our period, and find 
mention here only because they complete our story of the 
literary careers of two of ShakespeareVnotable contemporaries. 
Hall, to receive attention in the next chapter, is better remem- 
bered in the history of literature for his claim to be "the first 
Engli sh s atirist" than as the Bishop of Norwich, with wliom 
Milton disdained not to measure controversial swords. Among 
other famous pulpiters, Henry Smith was described in his 
time as "silver-tongued Smith"; Daniel Featley was valiant 
especially against Anabaptists; ^nd eloquent Lancelot Andrews, 
active among the translators of the Authorized Version of the 
Bible, defended his sovereign. King James, when the latter 
was fallen in controversial battle under the spear of the re- 
doubtable Cardinal Bellarmine. Richard Sibbes, too, was 
lauded for his pulpit oratory in King James' time; and 
Thomas Adams was dubbed by no less an authority than 
Southey "the prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians," 
whatever these words may convey to those who can understand. 
Of all these notable pulpiters, with their sermons, their med- 
itations, works of edification, and manuals of devotion, the 
outer fringe of a great literature, and as such the soonest 
dispensed with — it is enough to have mentioned each with 
honor in his place. 



CHAPTER XVII 

ELIZABETHAN SATIRE, THE EPIGRAM AND THE 
"CHARACTER" 

SATIRE is alike a mode and a form. As a mode it is 
constant to practically all literature, verse, drama, prose 
fiction, and the essay. So considered there is among the 
Elizabethans one superlative satirist, and that is Ben Jonson, 
of w^hose dramatic satires — chief among them Every Man 
Out of his Humor, Cynthia's Revels, and Poetaster — an 
account has already been given above. Formal satire, on the 
other hand, is a different thing. It came comparatively late ' 
in English as into other literatures. It is derived, in all the 
literatures of modern Western Europe, direct from the Romans 
and is one of the most self-conscious, as it is one of the most 
easily distinguishable, of literary forms. Although the satire 
of any given age must commonly be read with notes in the next, 
as the conditions on which its allusions are founded have 
lapsed into a half-forgotten past, its elements are remarkably 
constant and its subject-matter changes very little from age to 
age. "Satire," according to Heinsius (quoted by Dryden 
in his Dissertation on Horace), "is a kind of poetry, without 
a series of action, invented for the purging of our minds; in 
which human vices, ignorance, and errors, and all things 
besides, which are produced from them in every man, are 
severely reprehended; partly dramatically, partly simply, and 
sometimes in both kinds of speaking; but, for the most part, 
figuratively, and occultly; consisting in a low familiar way, 
chiefly in a sharp and pungent manner of speech; but partly 
also, in a facetious and civil way of jesting; by which either 
hatred, or laughter, or indignation is moved." 

It was in the nature of things that so self-conscious a 
literary form as satire should flourish for the first time in the 
first literary epoch of England which had learned to know 

316 



SATIRE OF MEDIEVAL TYPE 317 

itself and criticize its surroundings. Such an age was that of 
Elizabeth which, with all its love of novel and romantic ideas, 
had none the less within it that conservative force of reaction 
which we have already seen exerted to the full in the ideals and 
practices of Jonson. 

Older English satire was altogether informal; its source 
was not Horace or Juvenal, but contemporary life. It was 
likely to take either the form of burlesque or invective and 
was often political as well as social in its aim. The details of 
the satire of earlier Tudor times do not concern us here; 
suffice it to say that Barclay's celebrated Ship of Fools, Eras- 
mus' Praise of Folly, and the vigorous satires of the redoubt- 
able Skelton, though all show acquaintance with classical 
satirists, are of irregular medieval type, though freed in a 
measure from that leisurely and incessant allegorical quality 
which makes medieval satire so insupportable to the modern 
, reader. 

But three Roman satirists survived the wreck of time. 
These were Horace, Persius, and Juvenal; and all were known, 
at least in part, while Juvenal was dear to the medieval under- 
standing. All three were printed among the earliest printed 
books. The Satires of Horace were translated by Thomas 
Drant, an experimenter in classical meters for English, as early 
as 1566; but Persius was Englished by Holyday only in the 
year of Shakespeare's death, arid Juvenal not until much later. 
The eighteen satires of Horace and the twenty odd epistles 
which are very much like them, are the humorous narratives 
of personal experiences, with witty comment and reflections 
upon them of a kindly natured man of the world. Horace 
says. "Come let us laugh together at the follies of men; our- 
selves included." The sixteen satires of Juvenal, on the other 
hand, with which may be included the six of Persius, difi^er in 
pursuing the method of direct rebuke. They are the deeper 
and severer thoughts of the moralist and the philosopher, and 
they are as pessimistic in tone as they are bitter and ironical 
of speech. These were the men whom the Elizabethan writers 
of regular satire set themselves to imitate. But a curious 
error in the origin of the word, or confusion at the least, had 



3i8 ELIZABETHAN SATIRE 

much to do with affecting their practice of this art of the an- 
cients. As all know, the Latin word satura signified a mixture 
of fruits, as Dryden translated it, a hotchpotch. Most of the 
Elizabethans thought of a satire as a "satyrus," a "mixed 
kind of animal who was imagined to bring the rude observa- 
tions of his simple life to bear upon the faults of humanity." 
Even Every Man out of his Humor was registered in 1600 as 
"a comical satyre." Nor were the satires written in Italy and 
France in imitation of the Roman satirists - — the satires of 
Ariosto, of Alamanni, of Fresnayne, and Regnier — unknown 
to the writers of England, although it may be suspected that 
contemporary foreign authors exercised less influence in satire 
than in some other forms of literature. 

Sir Thomas Wyatt is, as Warton called him, "the first 
polished English satirist," and his three poems of this type — 
which however he did not call satires — are taken almost 
direct from Horace not without traces of an acquaintance with 
the other Roman satirists and more especially with the Italian 
Alamanni. At the same time they deserve much praise for 
their English quality in detail, for their poetic and ideal spirit, 
and for the humane character of their reflective mood which 
was caught from Horace and perhaps was never so well 
repeated by any subsequent English satirist. Wyatt's meter 
is the terza rima of Italy. In the same meter is Surrey's 
^'Satire against the Citizens of London" a serious moral poem 
in no sense a true satire. It has been remarked, as to this 
subject, that "there is an interesting contrast between Wyatt 
and Surrey — the former borrowing the spirit [of satire from 
Italy] without the name, and the latter the name without the 
spirit." 

The earliest Elizabethan satirist is Edward Hake, a lawyer 
and protege of the Earl of Leicester, whose News out of 
Paul's Churchyard was registered in 1568. Hake is a follower 
of old English satire and is little affected either by classical 
example or classical urbanity. His outlook on life is pessi- 
mistic and his picture of his "sottish sinful brittle age," as he 
terms it, while full of observation, is neither of any unusual 
merit nor very original. The most important of the early 



THE SATIRES OF DONNE 319 

satirists is George Gascoigne, whose Steel Glass long enjoyed 
a deserved popularity. This earnest moral poem has the 
distinction of being one of the earliest non-dramatic poems of 
any length to be written in English blank verse. It was printed 
in 1576 and is based on the conception that most human wfongs 
are due to the defective, if beautiful, visions reflected by 
flattery in glasses of crystal or beryl, while the poet in contrast 
holds up the true mirror of burnished steel to the common- 
wealth, reflecting therein all manner of men in their just pror 
portions. The Steel Glass, though eloquent, is scarcely more 
a satire in the classical sense than Spenser's Mother Huhherd's 
Tale, printed in 1591 but written far earlier, in which is related 
the prosperous adventures of two scoundrels, the fox and the 
ape, in a manner suggestive of Chaucer and its probable 
original, the fable oi Reynard the Fox. It is of interest to note 
that Mother Huhherd's Tale is the first satirical poem to 
appear in the familiar decasyllabic rirned couplet. Nor is 
the regularity with which Spenser here practised that popular 
measure less worthy of note. 

The life of that interesting man and genuine poet, John 
Donne, must be deferred for the present, as he is here to claim 
our attention merely as a satirist in regular form. To Donne 
the penning of his six or seven satires was as incidental to a 
career of celebrity in prose, poetry, and divintiy as was the 
writing of Venus and Adonis to Shakespeare. Donne's 
Satires, like most of his other verse, saw print only after his 
death, five appearing in 1633, a sixth in 1635, the seventh, the 
authenticity of which has been not unreasonably questioned, 
not until 1669. The actual date of their writing is difficult to 
ascertain; but there seems much reason to believe several 
of them already written by 1593 and well known, like Donne's 
lyrical poetry, in manuscript. Donne's Satires are written 
in decasyllabic couplets, the measure universally followed by 
regular satire in later times. But Donne's verse, here even 
more than elsewhere, is rough, irregular, and careless of the 
graces of versification. Donne's style, too, like his verse, is 
rugged and conversational, yet concise and compact in thought 
and at times obscure from the use of a Latinized construction; 



320 ELIZABETHAN SATIRE 

but ever vigorous, true to the object seen and observed at an 
angle of the author's own. The subjects of Donne's Satires 
and their method, combine the narrative and reflective satire 
of Horace v^ith the spirit of direct rebuke. While prevailingly 
pessimistic in tone, they by no means assume the Juvenalian 
attitude of authority to castigate vice and patronize virtue. 
The first satire of Donne describes how a young gallant of the 
time took the scholar from his books to walk abroad, the 
gallant's estimate of passing acquaintances, and his flight 
from his friend at sight of a pretty face at a window. The 
second attacks the vices and chicanery of lawyers, as the fifth 
lays bare the abuses and delays of justice; the fourth describes, 
in Horatian manner, that ubiquitous habitant of civilized ' 
places, the bore; whilst the last and doubtful one makes sport 
of the new carpet-knights of King James' creation, a stock 
theme for the ridicule of the age, and concludes with some 
references, more free spoken than courteous, to Essex, the 
late queen, and the new king. By far the best of these Sat- 
ires is the third,which deals in a serious tone, rising to momen- 
tary eloquence, of an unwonted theme for satire of classical 
type, religion. Donne hits off in capital manner those who 
seek variously for true religion, telling how one. 

Thinking her unhous'd here, and fled from us. 
Seeks her at Rome, there, because he doth know 
That she was there a thousand years ago; 

a second seeker, 

to such brave loves will not be enthrall'd, 
But loves her only who at Geneva is call'd 
Religion — plain, simple, sullen, young, 
Contemptuous, yet unhandsome. 

Still another "stays still [that is, always] at home here," and 
that 

because 

Some preachers 

bid him think that she 
Which dwells with us is only perfect. 



LODGE'S "FIG FOR MOMUS" 321 

Whilst a fourth 

doth abhor 
All, because all can not be good; as one, 
Knowing some women false, dares to marry none. 

Then rising to a higher strain he sings: 
Though truth and falsehood be 
Near twins, yet truth a little elder is. 
Be busy to seek her; believe me this. 
He 's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best: 
To adore, or scorn an image or protest, 
May all be bad. Doubt wisely, in strange way 
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; 
To sleep or run wrong, is. On a huge hill, 
Cragg'd and steep. Truth stands, and he that will 
Reach her, about must, and about must go 
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so; 
Yet strive so, that before age. Death's twilight. 
Thy soul rest, for none can work in the night. 

This passage marks the height of Elizabethan satire and 
Donne stands for his sincerity, for the new light that his 
original mind casts upon what he sees, as for the steadiness 
of his vision and honest outspokenness, foremost among Eliza- 
be than satirists. 

In 1595 Thomas Lodge, long fledged to literature of almost 
every type, printed his Fig for Momus. These satires, like 
Donne's, were written in decasyllabic couplets, but Lodge's 
regularity and smoothness of versification deserve the name 
of heroic couplet as Donne's verses never could. It is a moot 
question as to whether Donne, Lodge, or Joseph Hall is to 
be credited with the choice of this meter as the fitting raiment 
for satirical verse. Hall certainly wrote decasyllabics more 
nearly approaching the compactness and regularity of those 
of Dryden and his time than any other man of early days. 
But the whole question is wrapped up with another, who was 
the first English satirist, an honor which Hall claimed for 
himself. Donne seems the best claimant, although his work 
was published long after Lodge's and Hall's, which latter was 
in print by 1597. Donne was widely read in manuscript; 



322 ELIZABETHAN SATIRE 

Hall was most generally popular. Lodge seems to have been 
with some justice neglected, as the four satires which constitute 
his Fig for Momus are alike wanting in "the Horatian urbanity 
and the Juvenalian vigor." The latter Roman poet is plainly 
Lodge's model, not Horace as is sometimes said. But the 
English satirist shows many touches with both Horace and 
Persius, while maintaining an earnest and optimistic English 
spirit. Lodge's Fig for Momus is singularly free from local 
color and contemporary allusion and, while avoiding the 
affectation of a Roman atmosphere, is satire in the abstract 
and wide of the concreteness of Donne's allusions. 

Joseph Hall, later successively Bishop of Exeter and of 
Norwich, was by far the most generally read of Elizabethan 
satirists. Born in the year of the Armada, a Cambridge man, 
he lived to show his loyalty to church and state in now for- 
gotten writings and died a very old man shortly before the 
restoration of King Charles. Hall's Satires amount to some 
thirty-five in number. The entire work is called Virgide- 
miarum. Six Books, of buffetings; the earlier books are 
described as '' Toothless Satyrs," and subdivided into three 
books, respectively, poetical, academical, and moral, 1597; 
while the other three appeared in the following year under 
title Three Last Books of Biting Satyrs. These distinctions, 
however, are not vital. It was Milton who years after, in the 
heat of religious controversy in which the episcopal satirist 
held the opposite side, attacked Hall in a passage negligible 
for its personalities but not for the view of contemporary satire 
which it discloses. "A satire," writes the great poet, "as it 
w^s born out of tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage, 
to strike high and adventure dangerously at the most eminent 
vices among the greatest persons and not to creep into every 
blind tap-house, that fears a constable more than a satire. 
But that such a poem should be toothless, I still affirm it to be 
a bull, taking away the essence of that which it calls itself. 
For if it bite neither the persons nor the vices, how is it a 
satire ? And if it bite either, how is it toothless ? So that 
toothless satires are as much as if he had said toothless teeth." 

The compactness and regularity of Hall's meter has 



THE "SATIRES" OF HALL 323 

already been referred to; his style was scarecely less suggestive 
and prophetic of the age to come, in its hardness, brilliancy, 
wit, and restraint. Concerning his obscurity, his fondness for 
unfamiliar allusions and a certain remoteness of phraseology, 
the last has been referred to Hall's avowed admiration for 
Spenser and imitation of him, his fondness for unfamiliar 
allusions, to his following of the Roman satirists. Hall's vo- 
cabulary is not barbarous, as has sometimes been charged, and 
as to the other faults of obscurity they belonged in a measure 
to the contemporary conception of satire whence they have 
descended into the critical opinions of modern times. Indeed, 
it is quite notable that the first of the "biting satires" is the 
best imitation of Juvenal as it is likewise the most difficult to 
understand. 

The subject of obscurity in poetry is of a wider interest 
than the satires of Hall and I can not forebear the quotation of 
two fine passages of our Elizabethan poets on the topic. The 
first is from Daniel's Musophilos and reads: 

For not discreetly to compose our parts, 
Unto the frame of men (which we must be) 

Is to put off ourselves and make our arts 
Rebels to nature and society, 

Whereby we come to bury our desarts 
In the obscure grave of singularity. 

A very becoming opinion is this for "well languaged Daniel," 
true poet if somewhat conventional man that he was. But it 
should be read with this weightier passage of Chapman, 
Homeri Metaphrastes as he delighted to call himself. "Ob- 
scurity in affection of words and indigested conceits is pedanti- 
cal and childish; but where it shroudeth itself in the heart 
of his subject, uttered with fitness of figure and expressive 
epithets, with that darkness I will still labor to be shrouded." 

To return to Hall, in his Satires "poetical," he declares that 
"the nine Muses are turned harlots" in his degenerate age, 
inveighs against the "huff-cap terms and thundering threats" 
of tragedies like Tamhurlaine, the license of the stage clown, 
the absurdities of experiments in classical versification in 



324 ELIZABETHAN SATIRE 

English, the afFectations and warmth of amatory poetry, and 
other like matters. There is wealth of allusion to contem- 
porary literature in these and in the "academical satires" 
where the bad poetry of one Labeo and the folly of writing 
for money are especially attacked. But all is so obscurely 
phrased that, save the mention of T amhurlaine and enthusi- 
astic praise of Spenser, most of Hall's allusions remain prob- 
lematic. The interesting thing about the satirist's literary 
criticism is the consciousness of his attack on the prevailing 
romantic spirit of his age : and this at its very height. Without 
here going further into the subject-matter of Hall's Satires 
it may be noted that the remainder is of the conventional 
Roman type alike for its subject and its treatment. Hall was 
frankly imitative and while his attitude has much of the, 
assumption of the professed moralist, there was clearly in 
this young man of twenty-three the making of the serious and 
militant bishop that he afterward became. 

As much can not be said for John Marston, the dramatist, 
although he, too, died a clergymen of the Established Church. 
Marston, who was of Hall's age, followed up the publication 
of Hall's Satires, with five Satires and his Metamorphosis 
of Pigmalion's Image, published together in 1598. Later in 
the same year his Scourge of Villainy appeared, made up of 
eleven more satires. The author signed both works with a 
pseudonym, W. Kinsader; and they enjoyed for a time a 
popularity almost equal to the Satires of Hall. Marston 
followed Donne and Hall in the now finally approved decasyl- 
labic couplet, but with far less ease, compactness, and smooth- 
ness than the latter, and with a corresponding want of epi- 
grammatic effect though not without a gain in vigor. Marston 
is intentionally crabbed and grotesque and his vocabulary of 
"new minted epithets," so ridiculed by Jonson, has justly 
been described as monstrous though he only employs such 
terms in his more conscious moments. Marston is no more 
obscure than the other satirists of his time. The range of 
Marston's topics includes the usual "satirical" material — hyp- 
ocrites, flatterers, the foolish lover, lust and luxury, proci'as- 
tination, effeminacy, afFectations, and personal foibles. Hall's 



THE "SATIRES" OF MARSTON 325 

work was evidently their immediate inspiration, although 
evidences of the author's familiarity with Roman satire are 
not wanting, and Satire IF oi' the earlier set contains a direct 
answer to some of Hall's strictures upon contemporary litera- 
ture. The Scourge of Villainy sounds a note of conscious 
literary coxcombry which is one of the peculiar characteristics 
of Marston. The second edition, that of 1599, is dedicated 
"To his most esteemed and best beloved Self." Then follows 
a series of impertinent stanzas headed: "To Detraction I 
present my Poesy"; and the work concludes with an address 
to "Everlasting Oblivion": 

Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant! 
Deride me not, though I seem petulant 
To fall into thy chops. Let others pray 
Forever their fair poems flourish may: 
But as for me, hungry Oblivion, 
Devour me quick, accept my orison, 
My earnest prayers which do importune thee, 
With gloomy shade of thy still empery, 
To veil both me and my rude poesy. 

On all of which it has been sagaciously observed that "ob- 
livion is too easily had ever to be loudly demanded." None 
the less there is merit in these vigorous if not quite always, 
honest verses of Marston, nor are they wanting in a sense of 
design. Thus in the "Cynic Satire," as he calls it, his theme 
(in which we recognize a parody on the desperate exclamation 
of Shakespeare's Richard HI) is "A man, a man, my king- 
dom for a man!" and creature after creature, all but seeming 
men, parade before the satirist, to be anatomized under the 
eye of Lynceus who, it will be remembered, of all the Argo- 
nauts was keenest of sight. 

Elizabethan satire, in the restrictive sense and as compared 
with that of other ages, can not be rated very high. The mis- 
anthropy of Marston and Hall's judicial cynicism hardly ring 
quite true. Indeed, these worldly-wise satirists were sated 
with the gauds and snares of life at two or three and twenty. 
But for any deep-seated convictions on moral issues, any real 



326 SATIRE AND EPIGRAM 

detestation and revolt against evil, such as distinguished Jon- 
son's dramatic satires despite his self-poise and arrogance, we 
may look through the easy going pages of these young literary 
triflers in vain. 

If we turn from the field of formal and more or less ex- 
tended satire in the manner of the ancients to the many epi- 
grammatists and writers of irregular satirical verses, we find 
the species holding its own with the many satirical pamphlets 
of the prose pamphleteers. Thus we have, in 1598, the year 
of Marston's Scourge of Villainy, Thomas Bastard's Chres- 
toleros, a collection of two hundred and ninety epigrams; 
Edward Guilpin's vernacular and interesting Skialetheia, "a. 
Shadow of Truth in Certain Epigams and Satires"; and 
William Rankins' Satires in seven-line stanzas, ridiculing the 
absurdities of contemporary fashions. Rankins had pre- 
viously trespassed in this field with his more notorious prose 
satires, The Mirror of Monsters and The English Ape, in the 
former of which he attacked especially "the spotted enormi- 
ties of players." In 1599 appeared John Weever's Epigrams 
in the Oldest Cut and Newest Fashion, and also Microcynicon, 
the latter unnecessarily attributed to the dramatist Thomas 
Middleton. The prose pamphlets of Nash and Harvey, the 
last in their notorious war of personal abuse, were but a year 
or two old in 1599. Hall's satires had come out in the pre- 
vious year, and Dr. Rainolds was thundering from Oxford 
his total Overthrow of Stage Plays. Evidently this plain and 
bitter speaking was overdone; for, towards the end of 1599, 
an order was Issued by the ecclesi-astical authorities, command- 
ing that Hall's and Marston's satires, the Microcynicon, and 
certain other books, among them those of the Nash-Harvey 
controversy, should " be brought to the Bishop of London to 
be burnt," and that "no satires or epigrams be printed here- 
after." This order was duly executed as to most of these 
works; it was "staid" as to Hall, by what influence or for what 
reason is to us unknown. 

But satire and epigram were not thus to be put down. 
Other epigrams were those of the courtier and author of 
Nosce Teipsum, Sir John Davies, of various date and writing; 



ELIZABETHAN EPIGRAM 327 

those of his namesake, John Davies of Hereford, writing- 
master, entitled The Scourge of Folly, 161 1 ; and George 
Wither's Abuses Whipt and Stript, of the same date, Fitz- 
geofFrey and Owen penned epigrams of classical flavor in 
Latin; at the other extreme, Samuel Rowlands, general 
pamphleteer and hack-writer, put forth, between 1600 and 
twenty years later, a series of quaintly named satirical book- 
lets in verse, among them The Letting of Humor's Blood in 
the Head Vein, 'T is Merry When Gossips Meet, Diogenes 
Lanthorn, and the like. In the very last years of Shakespeare's 
lifetime, and after some subsidence, the epigram revived into 
a sudden brief lease of life. For in 1613 Sir John Harington 
published the first of his Epigrams Pleasant and Serious, and 
Richard Braithwaite, his rollicking Strappado for the Devil; 
while in the next year, that of Shakespeare's death, appeared 
Robert Anton's rare volume of literary epigrams called Vice's 
Anatomy Scourged and, most important of all, Ben Jonson's 
Epigrams, which form one of the divisions of the collective 
edition of his works, 1616. 

The Elizabethan epigram can not be considered as of 
much higher general merit than was the more formal satirical 
verse of the day. The word, epigram, was employed with 
great looseness to signify almost any brief non-lyrical poem not 
involving a narrative; and much occasional verse was in- 
cluded in the mass. Of the English epigrammatists, Jonson 
is easily the first, though there is wit and merit of its kind both 
in Bastard's Chrestoleros and in the Epigrams of Sir John 
Harington. These lines of Jonson, for example, "On Some- 
thing that Walks Somewhere," are epigram in the restrictive 
sense, and an excellent specimen of Jonson's satirical wit: 

At court I met it, in clothes brave enough 

To be a courtier; and looks grave enough 

To seem a statesman: as I near it came. 

It made me a great face; I asked the name. 

A Lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood, 

And such from whom let no man hope least good, 

For I will do none; and as little ill. 

For I will dare none: Good Lord, walk dead still. 



328 SATIRE AND EPIGRAM 

But Jonson considered this fine epitaph on his friend, Sir John 

Roe, Hkewise an epigram. 

In place of 'scutcheons that should deck thy hearse, 

Take better ornaments, my tears and verse. 

If any sword could save from Fates, Roe's could; 

If any muse outlive their spite, his can; 
If any friends' tears could restore, his would; 

If any pious life e'er lifted man 
To heaven, his hath: O happy state! wherein 
We, sad for him, may glory, and not sin. 

However, the real interest in verse of this kind lies in its 
allusiveness and in the illustrations that it offers of the customs 
and manners of its time. Though even here, such w^as the 
force of precedent and example in an age of classically edu- 
cated men, that many of the topics as well as the treatment at 
large of both satire and epigram must be sought, not in con- 
temporary Elizabethan life, but in the pages of Horace, Juvenal, 
and Martial. 

If we turn now from satire and epigram in verse to its 
kindred prose, we trespass into an even larger field, and one in 
which division and classification become well-nigh impossible. 
In the previous chapter of this book devoted to the pamphlet 
and the prose of controversy much of the earlier material, 
generically to be designated satire in prose, has already found 
its proper place of mention. Nash and Dekker in their prose 
are nothing if not satirical, whether the satire is incidental to 
fiction as in Jack Wilton, or to personal or political contro- 
versy. Such work as Dekker's Gulls' Hornbook is of course 
wholly and delightfully humorous and satirical, and it links 
in its origin and association not only with the wider continental 
satire, of which Grohianus is the type, but also with the inter- 
esting series of English pamphlets in which the nature and 
the shifts of contemporary vagabonds and sharpers are un- 
masked and, in unmasking, satirized. As early as 1565, 
John Awdeley put forth his Fraternity of Vagahonds, and two 
years later Thomas Harman followed with his Caveat for 
Common Cursetors. Both describe the various types of 
thieves, sharpers, and beggars that infested the streets of 



SATIRICAL PROSE PAMPHLETS 329 

London, Harman dealing even with their slang. These 
earlier works, however, are less satirical than seriously descrip- 
tive. Greene was not without his knowledge of them when 
he turned his ready pen to depicting the life of their successors 
in his series of five pamphlets on the haunts, characters, and 
subterfuges of the conycatchers, as he called the rogues, con- 
fidence men, and their like of the metropolis. These pam- 
phlets begin with A Notable Discovery of Cosenage, registered 
as The Art of Conycatchmg in 1591, and extend through 
several additional parts of similar title to The Black Book's 
Messenger in the following year. In them Greene drew not 
only on previous writers but on his own experiences, writing 
up his material precisely as a modern reporter might do, 
with considerably less regard for mere facts than for a lively 
and effective presentation of his subject. The like series of 
Dekker, which was published early in the reign of James, while 
borrowing much from his predecessors, is more humorous 
and satirical in character. This pamphlet work of Dekker's 
begins with The Batchelors' Banquet, in 1603, and extends 
through The Dead Term, The Bellman of London, Lanthorn 
and Candlelight to The Gulls' Hornbook, in 1 609. Samuel 
Rowlands was Dekker's immediate rival in this exploitation 
of low life. But his many booklets, such as Greene's Ghost, 
1602, and Martin Mar kail, 16 10, show neither Dekker's genial 
humor, literary aptitude, nor powers of observation. 

Into the smaller satirical pamphlet literature at large it is 
unnecesssary for us to go far. It descends to mere broadside 
and catchpenny, now laughing at folly with Robert Armin, 
a professional stage clown, in his Fool upon Fool or Seven 
Sorts of Sots, 1605, and Nest of Ninnies, 1608; now lam- 
pooning contemporary fashion in Rankins' English Ape, 1588; 
attacking the stage as in the same truculent writer's Mirror 
of Monsters, of the previous year, or Dr. Rainolds' Overthrow 
of Stage Palys, 1 599; or deriding the vanities of feminine 
attire, as in Gosson's Pleasant Quips for Upstart New-Fan- 
gled Gentlewomen, 1595. A later attack of this kind, entitled 
The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward and Inconstant 
Women, by Joseph Swetnam, 1615, called forth a number of 



330 SATIRE AND EPIGRAM 

retorts, some of them as violent and irrational as their cause 
and, among them, an anonymous satirical comedy, called 
Swetnam, the Woman Hater Arraigned by Women, 1620, a 
very curious production. This small prose of satirical con- 
temporary comment shades off into religious as well as social 
satire and controversy; for these satirists, objectors, and re- 
formers w^ere often, like Gosson, Stubbes, Wither, and Prynne 
somewhat later, Puritans and biased in their attitude towards 
life and the habits of their fellow men by a creed the rigor of 
which discomforted not only its professors but those who had 
the misfortune to differ with them as well. The typical social 
satirist of this type of strictly Elizabethan times is Philip 
Stubbes, the writer of several religious pamphlets in the eighties 
and early nineties. It was in 1583 that he published his 
Anatomy of Abuse, "containing a discovery or brief survey of 
such notable vices and imperfections as now reign in many 
Christian countries of the world; but especially in a very 
famous island called Ailgna (anagram for Anglia), together 
with most fearful examples of God's judgment executed upon 
the wicked for the same." Stubbes' book is quaint and di- 
verting in parts; and it is not without a certain force for its 
plain speaking, honesty, and homely humor. But the last 
is for the most part unconscious; for Stubbes was terribly 
in earnest, and trivial follies and pastimes, harmless in them- 
selves, are borne down in common overthrow with the seven, 
and other deadly Puritan sins in his trenchant anathemas as 
things accurst. The following is one of Stubbes' "fearful 
examples," somewhat curtailed in its diffusive eloquence: 

A gentlewoman of Eprautna (that is Antwerp) of late . . . 
being a very rich merchantman's daughter, upon a time was invited 
to a bridal or wedding, against which day she made great preparation 
for the pluming of herself in gorgeous array, that as her body was 
most beautiful, fair, and proper, so her attire in every respect- might 
be correspondent to the same. For the accomplishment whereof 
she curled her hair, she dyed her locks, and laid them out after the 
best manner. She colored her face with waters and ointments. 
But in no case could she get any (so curious and dainty she was) 
that could starch and set her ruffs and neckerchers to her mind . . . 



STUBBES' "ANATOMY OF ABUSE" 331 

Then fell she to swear and tear, to curse and ban, casting the ruffs 
under her feet and wishing that the devil might take her when she 
wear any of those neckerchers again. In the mean time (through 
the sufferance of God)the devil, transforming himself into the form of 
a young man . . . came in. . .and, seeing her thus agonized and in 
such a pelting chafe, he took in hand the setting of her ruffs, which he 
performed taher great contentation and liking. This doen, the young 
man kissed her, in the doing whereof he writhe her neck in sunder, 
so she died miserably, her body being metamorphosed into black 
and blue colors, most ugglesome to behold. Preparance was made 
for her burial, a rich coffin provided, and her fearful body was laid 
there in, and it covered very sumptuously. Four men immediately 
assayed to lift up the corpse, but could not move it; then six attempted 
the like, but could not once stir it from the place where it stood. 
Whereat the standers by marvelling, caused the coffin to be opened, 
to see the cause thereof. Where they found the body to be taken 
away; and a black cat, very lean and deformed, sitting in the coffin, 
setting of great ruffs, and frizzling of hair, to the great fear and wonder 
of all beholders. 

What the epigra-m is, as contrasted with the great variety 
of satirical verse that surrounds it, the "character" is in its 
own group of prose satires. "To square out a character by 
our English level," says Sir Thomas Overbury, "it is a picture, 
real or personal, quaintly drawn in various colors, all of them 
heightemed by one shadowing": in words, less figurative, a 
"character" is a brief descriptive sketch of a personage, in- 
volving a ruling quality or, of a moral quality, exemplified in a 
typical personage. The remote origin of this species of essay, 
(for it is clearly such), is traceable to Plato's disciple, Tyr- 
tamus of Lesbos, generally known by the name that his master 
bestowed on him for his eloquence as Theophrastus, the divine 
speaker. In 1592 appeared Isaac Casaubon's Latin trans- 
lation of the twenty-nine extant Characters of Theophrastus, 
and to this may be confidently attributed the vogue of this 
peculiar genre in English literature a short time after. De- 
spite some suggestive forerunners such as Harman's descrip- 
tions of the rogues of his earlier time, already mentioned, and 
further back (if we must turn to poetry) Chaucer's inimitable 
personages of the "Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, to Ben 



332 THE EPIGRAM AND THE "CHARACTER" 

Jonson, who read everything, must be assigned the first step 
towards a popularization of the "character." Thus the 
dramatis personae of Every Man out of his Humor dis- 
closes after the name of each person a brief satirical 
description, designating his salient traits or "humor." 

Puntarvolo. A vainglorious knight, over-Englishing his travels, 
and wholly consecrated to singularity; the very Jacob's staff of compli- 
ment; a sir that hath lived to see the revolution of time in most of 
his apparel. Of presence good enough, but so palpably affected in 
his own praise, that for want of flatterers he commends himself, to 
the floutage of his own family. He deals upon returns, and strange 
performances, resolving, in despite of public derision, to stick to his 
own particular fashion, phrase, and gesture. 

In the text of Cynthia's Revels there are several passages 
in vv^hich personages are thus wittily and succinctly described. 
Indeed it might be worthy some consideration whether Jon- 
son's whole notion of character portrayed by ruling trait or 
"humor" may not have been originally suggested by the 
Theophrastian "character." 

These plays of Jonson preceded Characters of Vices and 
Virtues by Joseph Hall, the satirist, by some nine or ten years; 
but it is specifically to Hall and not to Jonson that the "char- 
acter" in its stricter Theophrastian form owed its popularity. 
Jonson, as a dramatist, had emphasized the sketch of a per- 
sonage involving a ruling quality, and to this point of approach 
later "characterism," as it was called in its time, returned. 
Hall, on the other hand, as a moralist, conceived of the charac- 
ter as a moral quality exemplified in a typical personage. Be- 
tween his English, Virgidemiarum, Six Books, 1597, and his 
Characters, printed in 1609, Hall had published a witty Latin 
satire entitled Mundus Alter et Idem, 1605, translated as 
The Discovery of a New World, three years later. Hall's 
Characters fall into "characterisms" of virtues and, secondly, 
of vices. Individual essays treat of the wise man, the valiant 
man, the truly noble, the good magistrate; the hypocrite, the 
busybody, the malcontent. It is thus that the last, a favorite 
of the age in life as in the drama, is in part described: 



THE "CHARACTERS" OF HALL 333 

He is neither well full nor fasting; and though he abound with 
complaints, yet nothing dislikes him but the present; for what he 
condemned while it was, once past he magnifies, and strives to recall 
it out of the jaws of time. What he hath he seeth not, his eyes are so 
taken up with what he wants; and what he sees he cares not for, 
because he cares so much for that which is not. . . . Every blessing 
hath somewhat to disparage and distaste it; children bring cares, 
single life is wild and solitary, eminency is envious, retiredness ob- 
scure, fasting painful, satiety unwieldly, religion nicely severe, liberty 
is lawless, wealth burdensome, mediocrity contemptible. Everything 
faulteth, either in too much or too little. This man is ever head- 
strong and self-willed, neither is he always tied to esteem or pronounce 
according to reason; some things he must dislike he knows not where- 
fore, but he likes them not; and otherwhere, rather than not censure, 
he will accuse a man of virtue. 

Hall's Characters are exceedingly well written, full of 
worldly wisdom and animated by a sound average philosophy 
, of life. They are often wittily expressed. His shortcomings 
are incessant contrast and antithesis. We weary soon of his 
neatness of phrase, and his literary tidiness; and we breathe 
uneasily before long in this atmosphere of admirable moral 
abstraction. 

It is not unlikely that the famous Characters of Sir Thomas 
Overbury were written much about the time of Hall's, of which 
however they were far from a mere imitation. Their extra- 
ordinary popularity — six editions in a single year and sixteen 
in less than a generation — is referable in part to their merit, 
but mainly to the notorious murder of Overbury, which grew 
out of the greatest scandal of the court of King James. Sir 
Thomas Overbury was born in Gloucestershire in 1581 and 
educated at Queen's College, Oxford and the Middle Temple. 
He became an intimate associate and adviser of the king's 
favorite, Sir Robert Carr, later Viscount Rochester, and was 
knighted by King James in 1608. Rochester had been carry- 
ing on a flirtation with the frivolous young Countess of Essex 
whose boy husband (worthy of a better wife) had been travel- 
ing extensively abroad. Upon his return, although compelled 
to live with him, his countess showed for the earl, her husband, 
nothing but repugnance and contempt. After two or three 



334 THE EPIGRAM AND THE "CHARACTER" 

years of this life, a project was formed by which the countess 
was to sue, on what could only have been false pretences, for 
a divorce, thus to make a way for a marriage with Rochester. 
Her father and uncle were won over to this plan, and King 
James unquestionably connived at the designs and in- 
trigues of his favorite. Overbury, as the friend and adviser 
of Rochester, strongly opposed from the first both the policy 
of a divorce and a marriage for his patron with a woman such 
as Lady Essex. Moreover he had not been silent in this dis- 
approval; but had written, and perhaps circulated, a poem 
called The Wife, published after his death, to dissuade Roches- 
ter from a step so ill advised. For this Lady Essex took a 
terrible revenge. On Overbury's refusal to accept a foreign 
mission which the king was induced to tender him, he was 
committed by the king's council to the Tower for contempt of 
the royal commands and, after a number of abortive practices 
against his life, was finally poisoned by an apothecary's 
assistant. Lady Essex's creature, some ten days before the 
judgment granting her her wished-for divorce. The sump- 
tuous marriage of Lady Essex, Christmas of the same year, 
to Rochester, now raised to the earldom of Somerset that her 
ladyship might retain her rank, and the trial and conviction, 
three years later, of the guilty pair with their several accessories 
for the murder of Overbury, completed one of the blackest 
pages in the annals of the Stuarts. It was these events that 
gave a notoriety to Overbury's poem, The Character of a Wife, 
first published separately in 1614, and later in the same year 
with some twenty-nine other "characters" in prose. In the 
following editions the number of characters "by Sir Thomas 
Overbury and his friends," grew by accretion until, in the 
last of the old editions, that of 1638, they numbered eighty, 
the work thus having grown into an anthology, so to speak, 
of this species of essay. 

In such a collection the quality is of course far from equal. 
Overbury's own work is literary in its aim rather than moral. 
His characters, to speak of them at large, disclose no very 
deep observation of individual traits; nor are they typical in 



THE "CHARACTERS" OF OVERBURY 335 

any such sense as the "humors" of Jonson or the "charac- 
terisms" of Hall. But they are certainly clever, epigrammatic, 
and both brightly and quaintly written. Occasionally, as in 
"The Good Wife," "The Happy Milkmaid," or "A Worthy 
Commander in the Wars," the author (whoever he was) rises 
above mere smartness to a touch of sincerity and even of 
tenderness. The following famous description is somewhat 
condensed to conform to the plan of this book, not that difFuse- 
ness in the character as it was written demands it: 

A fair and happy milkmaid is a country wench, that is so far from 
making herself beautiful by art, that one look of hers is able to put 
all face physic out of countenance. . . . All her excellences stand 
in her so silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her knowl- 
edge. The lining of her apparel (which is herself) is far better than 
outsides of tissue; for though she be not arrayed in the spoil of the 
silk-worm, she is decked in innocency, a far better wearing. . . . 
She rises therefore with chanticleer, her dame's cock, and at night 
makes lamb her curfew. In milking a cow and straining the teats 
through her fingers, it seems that so sweet a milk-press makes the 
milk the whiter or sweeter; for never came almond glove or aromatic 
ointment off her palm to taint it. The golden ears of corn fall and 
kiss her feet when she reaps them, as if they wished to be bound and 
led prisoners by the same hand that felled them. Her breath is her 
own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made haycock. 
She makes her hand hard with labor, and soft with pity; and when 
winter's evenings fall early (sitting at her merry wheel), she sings a 
defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. . . . Thus lives she, and all 
her care is that she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers 
stuck upon her winding-sheet. 

On the success of Overbury's work, the character became 
the rage of the moment. Nicholas Breton was earliest in the 
field with his Characters upon Essays Moral and Divine, 16 1 5, 
in which the influence of Bacon's Essays is acknowledged and 
more patent than the example of Hall or Overbury. In 1616 
appeared The Good and the Bad by the same author. Here the 
characters are presented in pairs, as the worthy judge and the 
unworthy, the honest man and the knave. These are true 



336 THE EPIGRAM AND THE "CHARACTER" 

characters and are not wanting in the grace and lightness of 
touch that distinguish their clever and adaptable author. 
Through subsequent essays and characters of Geoffrey Min- 
shull, Henry Parrot, and others the species reached its height 
in literary excellence and perfection of form in John Earle's 
M icrosmography or a Piece of the World Characterized, first 
printed in 1628, and all but as popular in its time as Overbury's 
had been. But these latter works fall beyond our period. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

BACON, JURIST, PHILOSOPHER, AND ESSAYIST 

MANY reasons conspire to give to Francis Bacon a 
position of peculiar prominence in any consideration 
of English literature. A notable lawyer under Elizabeth, 
he attained to the woolsack and the chancellorship in the reign 
of King James. A philosopher of great, if questioned repu- 
tation, an orator of approved eloquence, an able historian, 
and our earliest English essayist — all these phases of a 
distinguished career must claim our attention, together with 
the great intrinsic worth of most of his writings, the excellence 
and variety of his style, the stimulating quality of his aphor- 
isms, and lastly, the mingling of his name with Shakespeare's, 
strange fruit of the ignorance, singularity, and perversity of 
the last generation and our own. 

Francis Bacon was born in January, 1561, the son of 
Nicholas Bacon, Queen Elizabeth's first Lord Keeper, and 
his second wife, Anne Cooke, who was sister to the wife of 
Lord Burleigh, the famous chancellor of Elizabeth. Bacon 
passed through the usual education of a gentleman of the day 
at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Gray's Inn, going abroad 
with an embassy when but sixteen years of age, and finding 
himself fatherless with but small fortune in 1579. Destined 
from the first for the law, he was admitted an utter barrister 
in 1582; becoming a member of Parliament in 1584, through 
the interest of his uncle Burleigh, and two years later a bencher 
of his Inn. Bacon's mother was described in her time as 
"exquisitely skilled in the Greek and Latin tongues"; she 
was also austerely religious, and avowed and practised a 
Puritanism of opinion from which her son Francis must 
soon have become estranged. Indeed, his earliest work is 
a letter of advice to the queen in which he deals wisely and 
moderately with one of the most difficult of her political 

337 



338 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

problems, the treatment of her own Roman Catholic subjects. 
In these early days Bacon was needy, extravagant, careless 
of practical affairs, compelled to labor at his profession for 
bread, wait in chargeable attendance at court for advancement, 
in ill health and neglected by his family. As to Burleigh 
and his cousin Cecil, Bacon was assiduous in his cultivation 
of both, and incessant in seeking through them for advance- 
ment. Burleigh could not have doubted Bacon's abilities 
or his subserviency to the family interests. He may have 
been suspicious of his talents and have mistrusted his phil- 
osophic ambitions. Burleigh certainly remained unsym- 
pathic. Cecil's apathy towards the interests of his brilliant 
cousin continued into the next reign. But Bacon could not 
be long in any assemblage of men without making felt the 
power and sublety of his mind; and his employment on public 
business was not infrequent during the ensuing years, though 
not in any matters of great moment or in posts of emolument. 
He was heard towards the last of the long and violent Mar- 
prelate quarrel in an able paper on Controversies in the Church 
in which he opposed alike the factious temper of the Puritans 
and the government's unwise rigidity as to conformity. 

About this time Bacon formed a warm friendship with 
the Earl of Essex, one of the most remarkable men of his age, 
highly favored of the queen, and apparently destined to a 
career of power and splendor. Essex seems to have been 
drawn to Bacon by a genuine appreciation of his larger and 
higher ambitions; for Essex was an intelligent patron of learn- 
ing, and an accomplished and cultivated man himself, pos- 
sessed of a generosity of temper and liberality in friendship 
that account for his popularity and the hosts of his friends. 
In 1593 the attorney-general's place fell vacant, and Essex, 
now a privy councilor, at once sought the post for Bacon. 
Bacon was young for such advancement, and better known for 
his pursuits of philosophy and literature than for his learning 
in the law. Besides, Sir Edward Coke, nearly ten years his 
senior, already solicitor-general and famed for his technical 
knowledge of the law, wanted the post for himself The 
Cecils suggested a compromise, by which Coke should be 



ELIZABETH AND BACON 339 

promoted to the attorney-generalship and Bacon become his 
successor as solicitor. But Essex refused compromise, and 
the queen appointed Coke attorney. Then Essex pressed 
for the solicitorship for Bacon; but he was passed over for 
an inferior man. Essex could do most things with the queen, 
but he could not promote Bacon; and Bacon suffered the 
added mortification of seeing the rich young widow of Sir 
Christopher Hatton, to whom he had made his addresses on 
the advice of Essex, accept the hand of Coke, his rival. 

Various reasons have been assigned to explain why so 
able a man as Bacon should not have received during the 
lifetime of Elizabeth that recognition to which his talents 
entitled him. One biographer states that it was Bacon's 
"fate through life to give good advice only to be rejected, and 
yet to impress those who received it with a sufficiently good 
opinion of his intellectual capacity to gain employment in 
:work which hundreds of others could have done as well." 
With Bacon a settlement in life was only the means to a 
larger end. In 1592, when thirty years of age, we find sure 
indications of the ambitious philosophical designs that were 
to make him famous. In one of his many letters of appeal 
to Burleigh, he disclosed his hopes and aspirations, declaring 
*T have taken all knowledge to be my province," and this 
less in the spirit of a boaster than in a fervid conviction, born 
of days of meditation and self-questioning. Bacon took the 
world about him as it was, accepted with cynical indifference 
its moral standards, and strove to thrive, as others thrived, by 
the world's methods. In the interest of worldly success he 
enlisted his keen intellect and his supple understanding; but 
he failed, for the most part, to make men his counters because 
he neither reached nor sought to reach their affections. If 
there was one thing in which Queen Elizabeth exceeded most 
monarchs, it was in a certain feminine intuition into character 
that enabled her to keep herself surrounded alike by the ablest 
and the most trustworthy of counselors. Elizabeth's tardy 
recognition of Bacon is one of the evidences of this. However 
willing she might have been to joke with the clever youth and 
call him "her little Lord Chancellor," she must have felt 



340 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

from the first that Bacon was an unsafe man; and it was 
reserved for her pedantic successor to be deceived by qualities 
of intellectual brilliancy, unsupported by the homelier, safer 
virtues that might well have misled a deeper man than the 
author of A Counterblast to Tobacco. It was in the reign of 
James that Bacon's honors crowded upon him; and it was 
in that reign that his memorable fall came. 

Essex continued the friend and patron of Bacon, impet- 
uously bestowing an estate valued at ;^i8oo upon him, and 
gained for him at last the post of one of the queen's counsel 
in 1596. No greater contrast could be conceived than that 
between Essex, ardent, masterful, inprudent, and headstrong, 
whom the old queen doted on and spoiled only to punish him 
for the presumption that she had invited, and Bacon, cool, 
intellectual, and subtle, working sinuously and circumspectly 
to personal ends, but stumbling at times among the gins and 
snares of that corruption and intrigue that was to bring about 
his ultimate fall. Bacon became the earl's adviser in the 
handling of his affairs, especially the management of his 
difficult royal mistress, seeking (there can be little question) 
to rise in the rise of the favorite. Whether an instance of 
the basest ingratitude in the annals of history or one of those 
cases in which the law of self-preservation may be pled in 
extenuation of an act outrageous in itself, it is certain that 
when the difficulties of the reckless career of Essex came to 
their logical conclusion, an impeachment for high treason, 
Bacon repudiated and explained away their intimacy, appeared 
of counsel against his benefactor, and was among the most 
powerful influences that brought about the earl's conviction" 
and execution. 

With the accession of James, the lets and hindrances to 
the career of Bacon were no more. He was first knighted, 
became in time an intimate of the king, and rose through the 
place of king's counsel in 1604, to Keeper of the Privy Seal 
in 1617, Lord Chancellor under the title Lord Verulam in 
1 6 19, and Viscount St. Albans two years later. Among the 
many trials that Bacon conducted as Lord Chancellor was 
that of Sir Walter Raleigh, the splendid adventurer and 



HIS IMPEACHMENT AND FALL 341 

favorite of Elizabeth, who had long languished in the Tower 
under the displeasure of King James. To Bacon, in his 
judicial capacity, Raleigh was no more than "an unscrupulous 
pirate and peculator, " and he did not concern himself with 
the circumstance that the charge was an old one, trumped 
up to serve the reestablishment of the cordial relations be- 
tween the King of England and the King of Spain. Into the 
circumstances by which the enemies of Bacon made head 
against him and convicted him of bribery we need not enter. 
Coke was brutally jubilant among them. We may feel sure 
that Bacon's conduct in the case of Essex was now remem- 
bered against him, not only by Southampton (who had been 
ruined and in prison for years for his part in the rebellion 
of Essex), but by many more. In a general movement 
against the abuses and corruption of the courts, Bacon 
was thus singled out and, from his exalted position and 
•personal distinction, became the center of attack. Brought 
to trial, the verdict of his peers of the House of Lords found 
Bacon guilty in all the charges brought against him, and 
punished him with a fine of ;^40,ooo, imprisonment in the 
Tower during the king's pleasure, banishment from the court, 
and a deprivation of any right to serve the commonwealth 
in Parliament or otherwise. Southampton's desire that the 
chancellor be degraded from the peerage was the only extrem- 
ity at which the verdict paused. And yet one thing was even 
more remarkable than this sudden overthrow in two months' 
time of the foremost judge of the realm; this was Bacon's 
complete and servile submission. It does not appear when 
the evidence is carefully sifted, as was not done in his time, 
that Bacon actually took bribes for the perversion of justice. 
His decisions were in accord with the evidence and the law, 
but he fell in only too readily with a system which, accepting 
large gifts from suitors pending the decision of their cases, 
and on the decision of cases in the suitor's favor, mingled 
payment for services with gifts of a questionable nature to 
the intolerable corruption of the administration of justice. 
Bacon's confession that "in the points charged upon me, 
although they should be taken as myself have declared them, 



342 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

there is a great deal of corruption and neglect, for which I 
am heartily and penitently sorry, " should be accepted sorrow- 
fully and without comment as conclusive, by all lovers of the 
truth. Bacon survived his disgrace but four years, although 
the king, in recognition of his long services to the state, tem- 
pered the fine and penalty, and preserved him in his dignities, 
his honors, and his titles. Bacon's life is a subject on which 
it is painful to dwell; and this when all has been said in exten- 
uation. His is a glaring example that the highest intellectual 
gifts are consistent with self-seeking, servility, ingratitude, 
and corruption. And it is no mitigation that the conduct of 
politics and even of justice in his day were far from free of 
any of these traits. The high-sounding aphorisms of the 
Baconian philosophy have in them ever the ring of hoUowness 
and mockery, and as we read them we forget the learning of 
the chancellor and the wisdom of the philosopher in the ser- 
vility of the courtier and the littleness of meanness rebuked. 
The works of Bacon are conveniently considered in three 
classes, his professional, philosophical, and literary writings. 
With the first we need not concern ourselves. None of them 
were published in the author's lifetime, although he prepared 
four Arguments of Law for the press. It is the opinion of 
the editor of Bacon's professional works that they exercised 
comparatively small influence on the progress of English law. 
They are distinguished, however, like his other work, by an 
intellectual clearness of vision beyond his age. In 1605 Bacon 
published The Advancement of Learning, which has been 
called "a careful and balanced report on the existing stock 
and deficiencies of human knowledge. " This work was not 
conceived at first as a part of his Instauratio Magna or Great 
Instauration (or Restoration), but was subsequently arranged 
to precede or form a part of the Novum Organum. It was 
fifteen years later, in 1620, when at the height of his prosperity, 
that Bacon published this most important part of his phil- 
osophical system, setting forth "the new instrument of thought 
and discovery," which he believed would prove the key to 
the command over nature. But the intervening years, with 
all his outer distractions, had been years of assiduous industry 



"THE GREAT INSTAURATION" 343 

and labor in his great task. The rejected projects of Bacon 
would stock a dozen average men with ideas for their combined 
lifetimes. "Experimental essays and discarded beginnings," 
treatises, matter biographical so far as it concerned his hopes 
and philosophical aspirations, mythology in The Wisdom of 
the Ancients as allegorically shadowing forth later truth, a 
fanciful philosophical tale. The New Atlantis — such were 
some of the chips and materials of experiment that lay to one 
side in that busy intellectual workshop in the center of which 
stood, when all was at an end, the incompleted colossus of 
The Great Instauration. 

"The Instauratio, as he planned the work, is to be divided," 
says Ellis, the notable editor of Bacon, "into six portions, of 
which the first is to contain a general survey of the present 
state of knowledge. In the second, men are to be taught how 
to use their understanding aright in the investigation of nature. 
. In the third, all the phenomena of the universe are to be stored 
up in a treasure-house, as the materials on which the new 
method is to be employed. In the fourth, examples are to 
be given of its operation and of the results to which it leads. 
The fifth is to contain what Bacon had accomplished in natural 
philosophy, 'not however according to the true rules and 
methods of interpretation, but by the ordinary use of the 
understanding in inquiring and discovering.' It is therefore 
less important than the rest, and Bacon declares that he will 
not bind himself to the conclusions which it contains. More- 
over, its value will altogether cease when the sixth part can 
be completed, wherein will be set forth the new philosophy 
— the result of the application of the new method to all the 
phenomena of the universe. But to complete this, the last 
part of the Instauratio, Bacon does not hope: he speaks of 
it as 'a thing both above my strength and beyond my hopes. '" ^ 

As we have it not only the Instauratio but the Novum 
Organum itself is only a fragment. It was published in 1620 
(as we have seen), and in Latin. The Advancement of Learning 

^Bacon's Works, ed. Ellis and Spedding, i, 71. The two quota- 
tions of Bacon's Latin words, as quoted by Ellis, I have transcribed 
in the translation by Spedding. 



344 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

appeared first in English. Other parts of the Instauratio and 
"works on subjects connected with the Instauratio but not 
intended to be included in it," are in English and Latin or, 
as more frequently, only in Latin. Such are the Historia 
VitcB et Mortis, printed in 1622, often quoted by Izaak Walton; 
and De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, the enlarged and 
Latinized version of The Advancement of Learning. In 1627, 
the year after Bacon's death, appeared Sylva Sylvarum or a 
Natural History in English, a collection of observations 
and experiments in the nature of things, remarkably wide in 
its range and often accute in discernment, but hopelessly 
antiquated long since not only to the physicist but to the average 
man. How impossible it is for even the sagest of men to 
escape his age is discernible in such a passage as this: 

There is a stone which they call the blood-stone, which worn, 
is thought to be good for them that bleed at the nose: which (no doubt) 
is by astriction and cooling of the spirits. Qucere, if the stone taken 
out of the toad's head be not of the like virtue; for the toad loveth 
shade and coolness. 

Elsewhere Bacon recounts, with apparent acceptance and 
approval, that "the heart of an ape, worn near the heart, 
comforteth the heart and increaseth audacity." But surely 
he who in Jonson's words could not "spare or pass a jest," 
is less the philosopher than the wit when he adds: "It may 
be the heart of a man would do more, but that it is more 
against men's minds to use it; except it be in such as wear 
the relics of saints. " 

Many an educated man, asked who was Francis Bacon, 
might describe him as the inventor of philosophic induction. 
This is of course absurd. The method of scientific inquiry 
in the Middle Ages was deductive, that is, the generalization 
was applied to the particular case. This method is apt to 
result in an examination of only those facts which are pre- 
viously supposed to be likely to sustain a preconceived theory 
or opinion, or at least to waste much time in ingeniously 
devised syllogisms, arguments, and explanations without a 
sufficient critical examination of the premises on which they 



THE BACONIAN INDUCTION 345 

may be founded. It was to right this that Bacon wrote the 
Novum. Organum. And the method he advocated was that 
of inductive logic, the procedure of which was generalization 
with the purpose of establishing the principle onlj after an 
exhaustive gathering arid consideration of the particular facts 
involved. It was a "systematic analysis and arrangement of 
inductive evidence, as distinct from the natural deduction 
which all men practise" that Bacon proposed; in his own 
happy illustration: 

The men of experiment are like the ajit; they only collect and use: 
the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own 
substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material 
from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and 
digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business 
of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of 
the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural 
history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory 
whole, as it finds it; but lays it up in the understanding altered and 
digested. 

Bacon's noble, if somewhat utilitarian, ideal, thus, of the office 
of philosophy was its mastery of the secrets of nature "to 
extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness 
of man. " Bacon's criticism of past error was just and needful, 
his separation of science from religion valuable in itself and 
for its consequences; his enlistment of physical experiment in 
application for the benefit of mankind most suggestive and in 
time fruitful. But we learn with amazement that this great 
and novel philosophy rejected the Copernican system of 
astronomy, held mathematics in undisguised contempt, and 
yet disdained not to discuss and accept current fallacies of 
popular lore such as the trivialities quoted above, some of 
them as old as Pliny's Natural History and disprovable by 
far less cumbrous methods than those of inductive logic. 

In short the position of Bacon as a philosopher is by no 
means the assured one that ignorance is apt to suppose it. 
His place at the dawn of modern science was that of one who 
points the true direction though he follow it not himself. 
Bacon was not a partaker in any actual scientific discovery 



346 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

of his day, nor a leader to any discovery that came after. He 
was not even in sympathy with the science of his time. For 
he disparaged Copernicus and criticized adversely Gilbert's 
treatise On the Magnet. While Bacon was condemning 
all investigation into final causes, Harvey completed his 
deductions as to the circulation of the blood; while Bacon was 
questioning the advantage of any use of optical instruments, 
Galileo was scanning the heavens with his telescope and adding 
star to star. Moreover, as to the Baconian system, practical 
workers, like the anatomist Harvey, like Liebig the chemist, or 
Bernard the physiologist, "say that they can find nothing to 
help them in Bacon's method." And Spedding, most appre- 
ciative of the editors of Bacon, declares: "Of this philosophy 
we can make nothing .... We regard it as a curious 
piece of machinery, very subtle, elaborate and ingenious, but 
not worth constructing, because all the work it could do may 
be done another way." Induction is not a method fruitful 
in results. However valuable Bacon's philosophical works 
may be in inspiration, for any value as an instrument or 
practical method of work — much less one that was to revolu- 
tionize the intellectual processes of mankind — this gigantic 
project must be pronounced a failure. 

Of the literary work of Bacon the chief is the well-known 
Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral. This famous book 
appeared first in a very small octavo volume, in 1597, with 
the title. Essays, Religious Meditations, Places of Persuasion 
and Dissuasion. The two latter items of this three-fold 
title refer to two other works, Meditationes Sacrce in Latin, and 
Of the Colors of Good and Evil, a fragment in English, Neither 
was afterwards reprinted with the Essays; and the Essays 
themselves were but ten in number. It is of interest, in view 
of the man that Bacon planned to be and inevitably became, 
that the topics of these earliest essays should have been of 
study, discourse, ceremonies and respect, followers and friends; 
of suitors, expense; regiment of health, of honor and reputa- 
tion, of faction, and of negotiating. The work was immedi- 
ately recognized and, like most popular Elizabethan books, 
soon pirated. In 1612 Bacon himself brought out a new 



THE "ESSAYS" 347 

edition, enlarged to thirty-eight essays under the simpler 
title, The Essays of Sir Francis Bacon; and in 1625 The 
Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral of Francis Lord Ferulam, 
now augmented to fifty-eight in number, represents the final 
state of the work. From the epistle of the first edition, dedica- 
ted to his brother, Anthony Bacon, it appears that the nucleus 
of the ten original essays had "passed long ago from my pen," 
that is, were written at a time well prior to their pubHcation 
in 1597. It also appears that they were printed by the author 
to stay unauthorized publication; for such seems the meaning 
of the words: "I do now like some that have an orchard 
ill-neighbored, that gather their fruit before it is ripe to pre- 
vent stealing." In a later dedication to Prince Henry, sup- 
pressed however owing to his death. Bacon speaks of his 
purpose: "The want of leisure hath made me choose to 
write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than 
curiously which I have called essays. The word," he con- 
tinues, "is late, but the thing is ancient. For Seneca's Epis- 
tles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but essays, that is 
dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the form of epis- 
tles. " That Bacon had another besides this ancient model 
is not to be questioned, although he quotes Montaigne but 
once. The Essais of Michel de Montaigne had appeared 
first in 1580, and by the time that Bacon wrote had reached 
at least a dozen editions in France. His title — essay, attempt, 
endeavor, modest enough in its day — Bacon had, beyond 
doubt, of Montaigne. Except for this and the genius of 
both, there is little in common between the two authors; for 
the gossipy self-portrayal of the French epicurean is at the 
opposite pole to the worldly wisdom, the abstract philosophy, 
and the glittering apothegm of the English lawyer. 

The first things that strike the reader of Bacon's Essays 
are their brilliancy, their polish, and their disconnectedness. 
As we read further, we appreciate more fully their practical 
sagacity, their wealth of pertinent illustration and quotation 
(after the manner of the time), and their extreme condensity, 
both of thought and of expression. The subjects of these 
Essays are, for the most part, abstractions, — truth, love, am- 



348 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

bition, vainglory; but some relate to social and human rela- 
tions, as parents and children, and the essay on marriage, 
and more to politics, social conditions, and conduct in life. 
Not least interesting are they at large in that they reveal the 
man habituated to thought on all things, now great with the 
larger issues of human existence, again minutely particular 
in the minor things and even the trivialities of life. Of subject- 
matter less momentous are the essays "of Building," "of 
Masques and Triumphs," "or the Regiment of Health," and 
the delightful paragraphs "of Plantations," and "of Gardens. " 
While partaking largely of the quaintness which, to us at 
least, seems a pervasive quality of Elizabethan literature. 
Bacon's is a remarkably modern tone, and his short, crisp 
sentences and sureness of statement enhance his modernness 
of diction. Bacon's analogy and illustration is exhaustless, 
and he shines at times with the brilliancy of epigram and the 
gorgeousness of a magnificently rhetorical imagination. But 
however prismatic the colors. Bacon is absolutely devoid of 
any warmth of passion. Such a man must have been a great 
orator from the power of his mind, if not from the eloquence 
of his heart. And we read for the first time, with positive 
expectation that it is to be found somewhere, the celebrated 
passage of Ben Jonson as to the eloquence of the Lord Chan- 
cellor: 

There happened in my time one noble speaker who was full of 
gravity in his speaking; his language, when he could spare or pass a 
jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more 
pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in 
what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own 
graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without 
loss. He commanded where he spoke, and had his judges [i. e. those 
before whom he was pleading] angry and pleased at his devotion. 
No man had their affections [i. e. emotions] more in his power. The 
fear of every man who heard him was lest he should make an end. 

Returning for a moment to the style of the Essays, sen- 
tentiousness, condensity, and pregnancy of thought have 
seldom been carried to such a degree. And these things were 
compassed, as we know by reference to the successive versions. 



THE "ESSAYS" 349 

only by the most assiduous and painstaking revision. Indeed, 
outside of the pages of the great Roman historian, Tacitus, 
it may be doubted if a more complete success has ever been 
attained in a like terse and difficult style. Yet it is a mistake 
to think of Bacon as a man possessed of a single literary style, 
how^ever excellent." The Advancement of Learning exhibits 
the philosopher's evidences of design, and the v^hole treatise 
is wrritten v^ith the continuity and copious flow w^hich is suit- 
able to so stately a topic. In The History of Henry VH, 
and especially in the interesting fragment. The New Atlantis, 
the narrative is handled with a directness and steady progress 
that must surprise the reader who knows his Bacon, as too 
many of us do, only by the Essays. 

So as marvel you not at the thin population of America, nor at 
the rudeness and ignorance of the people; for you must account your 
inhabitants of America as a young people; younger a thousand years, 
at the least, than the rest of the world; for there was so much time 
between the universal flood and their particular inundation. For 
the poor remnant of human seed which remained in their mountains 
peopled the country again slowly, by little and little; and being a 
simple and savage people, (not like Noah and his sons, which was the 
chief family of the earth), they were not able to leave letters, arts, 
and civility to their posterity. 

Very different in style and structure are the familiar words : 

Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider. 
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few 
to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only 
in parts; others to be read, but cursorily, and some few to be read 
wholly and with diligence. Reading maketh a full man, conference 
a ready man, and writing an exact man. 

And yet with all this literary excellence, and with a reputa- 
tion to endure while English literature shall last, few great 
men have so little deserved a place of literary eminence by 
their own act. Bacon, unlike many of his great contempo- 
raries — Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Hooker, and Jonson — held 
his mother tongue in undisguised contempt, and spent much 
time in translating his works into Latin that they might 



350 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

endure to posterity. In his own words, often quoted, from a 
letter to his friend, Sir Toby Matthew: 

My labors are now most set to have those works, which I have 
formerly published, as that of Advancement of Learning, that of 
Henry VII, that of the Essays, being retractate and made more 
perfect, well translated into Latin by the help of some good pens 
which forsake me not. For these modern languages will at one time 
or other play the bankrupts with books: and since I have lost much 
time with this age, I would be glad, as God shall give me leave, to 
recover it with posterity. 

Bacon was, in all probability, insensible of the glorious wealth 
of literature that was springing up around him; or if sensible, 
too pusillanimous to trust his fame in the same vehicle with 
that of low-born playwrights and Bohemian pamphleteers. 
He preferred the passionless rhetoric of a dead tongue to this 
living carriage of animate speech; and as a penance, much of 
his work lies as in the tomb, the resort of the enthusiastic 
metaphysician or the curious historian of speculative thought. 
It would ill have become the philosopher who "took all 
learning for his province" to have remained wholly uncon- 
versant with the poetical and the theatrical activities of his 
age. And despite the Baconian insensibility noticed above, 
of these "toys," too, the great man took a condescending 
cognisance. As early as 1587 we find Bacon one of some half- 
dozen young gentlemen, members of Gray's Inn, engaged in 
devising dumb shows (such as those in Gorhoduc) for '^Certain 
Devices,'- acted before her majesty. In 1592 Bacon wrote 
"speeches" for a device presented to the queen when enter- 
tained by Essex. Bacon also contributed similarly to the 
Gesta Grayorum in the protracted festivities of his Inn, in 
1595. Far later, in 1613, on the occasion of the celebrations 
incident to the marriage of the king's daughter Elizabeth 
to the Prince Palatine, Bacon is described as "the chief con- 
triver" of Beaumont's excellent masque. Lastly, in the fol- 
lowing year. Bacon was designated, "the chief encourager" 
of the anonymous Masque of Flowers, on which he is said 
to have expended no less than ;£^2,ooo. Yet if we would know 
Bacon's attitude as to these matters, we must turn to the well- 



TRAFFIC WITH THE STAGE 351 

known essay, "of Masques and Triumphs." There it is 
that he writes : 

These things are but toys to come amongst such serious observa- 
tions. But yet since princes will have such things, it is better they 
should be graced with elegancy than daubed with cost. Dancing 
to song is a thing of great state and pleasure. . . . Acting in song, 
especially in dialogues, hath an extreme good grace: I say acting, 
not dancing, for that is a mean and vulgar thing. And the voices 
of the dialogue would be strong and manly: a base, and a tenor, no 
treble; and the ditty high and tragical, not nice or dainty. Several 
choirs, placed one over against another, and taking the voice by 
catches, anthem-wise, give great pleasure. Turning dances into figure 
is a childish curiosity. And generally let it be noted that those things, 
which I here, set down, are such as do naturally take the sense and not 
respect petty wonderments. It is true, the alterations of scenes, so 
it be quietly and without noise, are things of great beauty and pleasure: 
for they feed and relieve the eye before it be full of the same object. 
Let the scenes abound with light, especially colored and varied, and 
let the masquers or any other that are to come down from the scene, 
have some motions, upon the scene itself before their coming down: 
for it draws the eye strangely and makes it with great pleasure to 
desire to see that it can not perfectly discern. 

And after another page of this patronizing, he abruptly 
breaks off: "But enough of these toys." Elsewhere Bacon 
speaks with similar disdain of "the transcendence of poesy"; 
advises that we "leave the goodly fabrics of houses for beauty 
only, to the enchanted palaces of the poets; who," he adds, 
"build them with small cost"; and quotes with approval 
St. Jerome's designation of poetry as vinum daemonum 
(/. ^. wine of devils) "because it fiUeth the imagination . 
but with the shadow of a lie. " 

The late Dr. Grosart, an indefatigable editor and gleaner 
in the well-reaped fields of our old literature, has collected 
"The Poems of Francis Bacon." The collection includes 
The Translation of Certain Psalms, six or seven in number, 
which curiously enough his lordship published himself, in 
1625, with a dedication to George Herbert; and two other 
pieces. As to the psalms, Bacon translated them, as who did 
not in that age from Sir Philip Sidney and Queen Elizabeth 



352 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

herself, to Bishop Parker, and Sternhold and Hopkins ? As to 
their merit as poetry, Spedding remarks: "An unpractised 
versifier who will not take time and trouble about the work, 
must of course leave many bad verses : for poetic feeling and 
imagination, though they will dislike a wrong word, will not 
of themselves suggest a right one that will suit meter and 
rime: and it would be easy to quote from the few pages that 
follow not only many bad lines, but many poor stanzas." 
Dr. Grosart, on the other hand, whose enthusiasm for the 
particular author that he happened at the moment to be editing 
commonly outstripped his judgment, declares himself able 
to make "fresh discoveries of beauty, ineffable scintillations 
of true 'Promethean heat' " in these psalms, whenever he 
"returns" to them. Of the other two poems, one beginning: 

The man of life upright whose guiltless heart is free 
From all dishonest deeds and thoughts of vanity, 

is attributed by somebody to Bacon in the manuscript in 
which it occurs, and is verily such "as might very well have 
been written by Bacon, or by a hundred other people." 
Lastly, "the expansion of a Greek epigram," as the remaining 
"poem" attributed to Bacon is entitled, is a production caUing 
for more attention. It is superior in workmanship to any 
of his psalms, and it is less a translation, or even a paraphrase, 
of its original (an epigram from the Florilegium, attributed to 
Poseidippus), than a new poem on the suggested theme. 
These lines run as follows: 

The world 's a bubble, and the life of man 

Less than a span; 
In his conception wretched, from the womb, 

So to the tomb; 
Cursed from his cradle and brought up to years 

With cares and fears: 
Who then to frail mortality shall trust, 
But limns on water or but writes in dust ? 

Yet, whilst with sorrow here we live opprest, 

What life is best ? 
Courts are but only superficial schools 

To dandle fools; 



BACON AND POETRY 353 

The rural part is turned into a den 

Of savage men; 
And where 's a city from foul vice so free 
But may be termed the worst of all the three ? 

Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed, 

* 
Or pains his head: 

Those that live single take it for a curse, 

Or do things worse; 
These would have children; those that have them moan 

Or wish them gone: 
What is it, then, to have or have no wife, 
But single thraldom or a double strife ? 

Our own affections still at home to please 

Is a disease; 
To cross the seas to any foreign soil, 

Peril and toil; 
Wars with their noise affright us, when they cease, 

We are worse in peace: 
What then remains, but that we still should cry 
For being born, or, being born, to die ? 

From this repellent piece of pessimism, with its precision of 
thought and polish of style, let us turn where we will to Shake- 
speare : 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds 

Admit impediments. Love is not love 

Which alters when it alteration finds. 

Or bends with the remover to remove: 

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark 

That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 

It is the star to every wandering bark, 

Whose worth 's unknown, although his height be taken; 

Love 's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 

Within his bending sickle's compass come; 

Love alters not with his brief hours or weeks, 

But bears it out even to the edge of doom: 

If this be error and upon me proved, 

I never writ nor no man ever loved. 



354 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

Here is wisdom, the wisdom of the seer, not of the logician; 
here is beauty of thought and loveHness of poetic form; thought 
poetical, not epigrammatic; form in those free lines that mark 
the sure stroke of artistic mastery, as opposed to the thought 
of the admirably clear, cool, and subtle mind that is the anti- 
thesis of the poet. The epigram, quoted above, is certainly 
Bacon's, not only for the contemporary evidence but for its 
Baconian spirit of worldliness and its hard-eyed recognition 
of the vanity and futility of such a life as was his. But it is 
little to found the reputation of a poet on. Indeed, Bacon's 
touch with poetry is scarcely more serious than his momentary 
points of contact with the drama. 

If we dare emulate for the moment the rhapsodical art 
of the late Mr. Swinburne, among the many vagaries and 
wanderings into darkness that egotistic singularity has begot- 
ten on crass ignorance none could be more unfortunate than 
any confusion of the lives, the characters, or the works of 
Francis Bacon with William Shakespeare. For, ransack 
Elizabethan England how we will, it would be impossible to 
find two minds of conspicuous prominence more radically 
different in their natures, their modes of thinking, and quality 
of achievement than were the minds of these two great men. 
The man, whatever his name, who wrote the plays which 
still issue under the name of Shakespeare in thousands of 
impressions yearly, was country born and acquainted with 
rural sports: moreover he possessed a knowledge of such 
things that came by nature. Again, he was a man absolutely 
free from the slightest suspicion of bookishness and pedantry, 
a man of "small Latin and less Greek." In the third place, 
the man that wrote the Shakespearean plays was one intimately 
conversant with the theater; not merely to the degree of assist- 
ing in the preparation of one or two masques for the enter- 
tainment of her majesty, but to the extent of many years of 
actual service, involving the ordeal of a rigid apprenticeship, 
the revision and refashioning of old work, the treading the 
boards as an actor, and that feeling of the pulse of the public 
which the clever manager learns to interpret with unfailing 
success. Lastly, the writer of these plays was a poet; a man 



BACON AND SHAKESPEARE 355 

of lavish and exuberant imagination, pregnant with wisdom 
and illumined with the purest vein of humor known to lit- 
erature. To country breeding, the absence of all that makes 
the bookish man, an intimate conversancy with the public 
stage, and the qualities that combine to make the most con- 
summate of poets and dramatists, might be added many other 
characteristics which all would agree must have animated 
the heart and brain of the author of these plays: his universal 
sympathy and charity, his lofty ethics, his deep and noble 
philosophy of life — but enough has been written. 

Now, in view of all this, what sort of a man was Francis 
Bacon ? City born and courtly bred, with an ideal of a trim 
clipped garden as "the greatest refreshment to the spirit of 
man, " with a knowledge of herbs and flowers, extensive (as 
was all his knowledge) and pedantically scientific (as was 
much of it). As to his acquaintance with contemporary 
drama, Spedding declared that in all his study of Bacon he 
had never seen any sign that the philosopher had ever read 
a line of Shakespeare. A time-server and a trimmer, whom 
the wise Queen Elizabeth mistrusted and the unwise King 
James advanced; a scholar and an author distinguished for 
his English prose, yet one, as we have seen, who feared lest 
his mother-tongue might prove a bankrupt, as he put it, and 
therefore entrusted the precious freight of his philosophy to 
Latin; a philosopher who sought to revolutionize the processes 
of human thought but rejected some of the most important 
scientific discoveries of his own time; a jurist, the most 
eminent of his day, self-convicted of corruption. 

It is possible to treat with respect and accept so far as the 
evidences appeal to reason, the scholars' proofs that parts 
of Shakespeare as printed to-day are not his; that Fletcher's 
hand is discernable in Henry Fill, and that other inferior 
authors may have penned portions of other plays. The 
influence of Lyly is patent in the earliest comedies, and Mar- 
lowe's is as unmistakeable in the earlier historical dramas. 
Conceivable — although the present writer could not share 
it — is a fancy that Ben Jonson transcended himself in the 
writing of parts of Julius Ccesar; or that Spenser miraculously 



356 BACON, PHILOSOPHER AND ESSAYIST 

wrote some passage or other of these plays, showing himself 
for the first and only time in his life a dramatist. But of 
all the men of Elizabeth's reign, great and little, gentle or 
common, poets or none, there is not one so infinitely removed, 
so absolutely alien, in character, spirit, and nature, in qualities 
of mind and of heart from the author of Shakespeare's plays 
as Francis Bacon. The man who wrote the Shakespearean 
dramas was one whose birth, and extraction, whose education, 
training, and experience in life were the precise counterpart 
of the little that we know and the more that we may with 
reason infer to have been Shakespeare's. These plays are 
Shakespeare's very own; and least of all things conceivable 
is the preposterous notion that they could in any part or parcel 
have been written by such a man as Bacon. 



CHAPTER XIX 

DONNE AND HIS PLACE AMONG LYRICAL 
POETS 

WE know more of the outward events of the life of John 
Donne than of any poet or writer of his age, and yet 
he remains a personage strange and enigmatic, and a poet 
more often misjudged than appreciated. Donne's was a 
twofold greatness. A biographer, not long since, wrote a 
Life of Donne in which he confesses to little sympathy with 
his poetry.^ He was writing of the famous Dean of St. Paul's, 
amongst the most learned of divines in an age of deep theolo- 
gical learning, the most brilliant and persuasive preacher of 
his day. Of Donne as a divine we have already heard in 
this book. But Donne would remain great in the history of [/' 
literature with the Dean of St. Paul's neglected, in that he is 
the most original, the most independent, the most perverse, 
yet in some respects among the most illuminated of the poets 
of the latter days of Elizabeth. Nor is it possible to separate 
wholly these two aspects of Donne's career; for although there 
is little of the future divine in those strange and cynical erotic 
poems which formed so interesting a part of the exercises of 
his youth, still his poetry would be far from what it is to us 
were the spirituality of his later poems not to enter into account. 
On the other hand, it is the power of poetry in the divine as 
well as the beauty and sanctity of his life that endeared him 
to those whose privilege it was to know him, and made him 
a power for good in his day. 

John Donne was born in London in 1573, the..,,yegr„,p£-««^ 
Jonson's 'iiirth'. His father, also John Donne, was Master 
of the Ironmongers' Company and a man of wealth and prom- 
inence. His mother was Elizabeth Heywood, daughter of 
John Heywood, the famous epigrammatist and writer of 
interludes in the days of Henry VIII. Both families were 

^ John Donne, Sometime Dean of St. Paul's, by A. Jessopp, 1897. 

357 ' 



358 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

stanch Roman Catholics; and they remained such, and 
suffered for their faith. Donne's education was superintended 
by his uncle, Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit of prominence and 
translator, with others, of Seneca's tragedies. In order to 
escape the difficulties of taking the oath of allegiance (which 
was made particularly offensive to them), it was the custom 
for Roman Catholic boys to go up to college very young; for 
the oath was not exacted of any under the age of sixteen. 
Donne and his brother, Henry, matriculated at Oxford when 
twelve and eleven years of age, John leaving when less than 
fourteen. There he formed a warm friendship with Sir 
Henry Wotton, which lasted through life. Both left Oxford, 
however, without a degree, and Donne probably traveled 
abroad, as we know that Wotton did, with the design (as we 
should put it) of entering the diplomatic service. In 1592 
we find Donne again in England, a student at Lincoln's Inn 
and intimate with the young poet, Christopher Brooke, the 
friend of Browne and Wither. Donne certainly enjoyed 
extraordinary advantages in the study of science and language. 
His curiosity appears to have led him early to wide reading on 
a diversity of subjects, especially law and the dialectics of 
theology. But it does not appear that he became "a. con- 
vinced opponent of Romanism" until the year 1603. Donne 
was attendant at the famous meetings at the Mermaid Tavern, 
where he met Shakespeare, Jonson, Drayton, Beaumont, and 
many lesser men. Reputation as a poet and a scholar came 
to Donne early. He was possessed of a competence; and his 
expectations were doubled on the untimely death of his only 
brother when but just of age. Donne spent his money, too, in 
the manner of a gentleman, frequenting the best literary and 
fashionable society. He seems to have been a man of hand- 
some person and engaging manners; and he easily acquired 
a host of friends. But one thing stood against preferment. 
His uncle. Father Heywood — at one time "esteemed the 
Provincial of the English Jesuits " and lodged in the Tower 
for his activity in political intrigue — had long lived abroad, 
conspicuous among the proscribed recusants; and Donne was 
suspected of more than a sympathy with the old faith. 



DESCRIPTIVE POEMS 359 

Donne began his literary career as a satirist, though he 
himself published nothing. To Donne's Satires we need 
not return. In 1596, when the expedition against the Spanish 
king was fitted out, Donne offered himself as a volunteer 
to the Earl of Essex and was accepted. He accompanied 
both expeditions against Spain; and in that against Cadiz 
formed an intimacy with Thomas Egerton, son of Lord 
Chancellor Ellesmere. The two descriptive poems, "The 
Storm" and "The Calm," belong to this period. Ben Jonson 
admired the latter and declared to Drummond that he had 
"by heart . . . that dust and feathers do not stir, all 
is so quiet." The passage to which Jonson alluded runs: 

The fighting place now seamen's rags supply; 
And all the tackling is a frippery. 
No use of lanthornes; and in one place lay 
Feathers and dust, today and yesterday. 

There is no better illustration of Donne's uncompromising 
realism matched with his characteristic remoteness of thought 
than this which follows. He is speaking of the storm and its 
effects on his shipmates : 

Some coffined in their cabins lie, equally 
Grieved that they are not dead, and yet must die. 
And as sin-burdened souls from grave will creep 
At the last day, some forth their cabins peep 
And trembling ask what news and do hear so 
As jealous husbands what they would not know. 
Some sitting on the hatches, would seem there 
With hideous gazing to fear away fear. 
Then note they the ship's sicknesses, the mast 
Shaked with an ague and the hold and waste 
With a salt dropsy clogged, and all our tacklings 
Snapping, like too-too-high-stretched treble strings, 
And from our tattered sails rags drop down so 
As from one hanged in chains a year ago. 

Indeed, nothing could be more discordant to the general accep- 
tation of poetry than these harsh, vivid, and ingenuous lines. 
We are concerned neither with their place in literature nor 



36o DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

their qualities as poetry, but with their marked character- 
istics and divergences from the prevailing type of the moment. 
And as to this, there can be no two opinions. 

On his return from the Cadiz expedition the good offices 
of his friend, young Egerton, procured Donne the post of 
secretary to his exalted father the Lord Chancellor. This 
post Donne held for four years, throwing himself heart and 
soul into the amusements and the frivolities of the court, yet 
reserving from every day some part to slake in study what he 
calls "an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning." 
It was in these years that Donne acquired his great repute as 
a wit and a poet, carelessly tossing off both verse and prose 
(the latter in the form of "paradoxes" and problems), to be 
read in clubs, discussed in ordinaries, and copied into man- 
uscript commonplace books, the author taking not the least 
heed as to the printing or preservation of either. 

The lyrical poetry of a secular character which Donne has 
^leftHs lies in point of date of writing between 1592 and iSoi. 
It contains that fascinating, yet forbidding, group of poems 
which add to all his other traits of idiosyncrasy the.iifi5i£!.15ote • 
of a frank and daring cynicism. The audacious outspoken- 
ness of several of these erotic poems has blinded readers to 
their possible autobiographical significance. And yet these 
poems give us really very little definite biographical infor- 
mation. They are often as cryptic as the Sonnets of Shake- 
speare themselves. Indeed, it is possible that we may make 
too much of all these throes, and agonies, and intensities of 
fleshly love. There is such a thing as the libertine in thought 
as well as the roue in practice. Of the latter we hear very 
little subjectively in literature. He wallows in his sty, and 
even Circe takes Httle note of him save to feed him. It is 
otherwise with the libertine in thought. It is the adventure, 
the danger, the imaginativeness of the pursuit of unlawful 
love — dare we call it the sporting instinct ? — which interests 
him. The very cynicism of Donne's earlier erotic poetry 
confirms this opinion. It was the same active insatiable 
curiosity and interest in the fulness of life which caused Donne 
on the one hand to dip into forbidden volumes of heresy, 



EARLIER LYRICS 361 

alchemy, and pseudo-science, and on the other to court and 
dally inaginatively with experiences which come not to those 
that tread the beaten paths of virtue. Take, for example, 
the famous song, "Go and catch a falling star," wherein one 
who has journeyed far to see "strange sights" is compelled 
to "swear" 

Nowhere 
Lives a woman true, and fair. 

The concluding stanza of the lyric is even more outrageously 
cynical : 

If thou find'st one, let me know, 

Such a pilgrimage were sweet, 
Yet do not, I would not go. 

Though at next door we might meet; 
\ Though she were true when you met her, 
And last till you write your letter, 

I Yet she 

Will be 
False, ere I come, to two or three. 

The poemS"1of Donne came much into fashion from their 
absolute originality, and it may be ajfhrmed that he exerted 
a powerful influence on the course of English poetry before 
he was aware of it himself. Indeed, Donne's attitude to- 
wards his poetry throughout his life was that of the gentle- 
man and courtier of his day, except that he was sincere in his 
regard of poetry as a trifle: others often affected this attitude. 
Donne was always an insatiable student. "His reading," 
says Jessopp, "embraced an extraordinary range of learning, 
which his command of foreign languages and his great ver- 
satility tempted him to widen. He read with his pen in hand, 
annotating, digesting, commenting. Nothing came amiss: 
scholastic theology and casuistry, civil and common law, 
history, poetry, philosophy, even medicine; and all these 
subjects, not only in the language of the learned, but in the 
vernacular of France, Italy and Spain. " 
^ In i6oi Donne crowned a romantic love story with an 
imprudent marriage, clandestinely solemnized. There is 



362 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

nothing to his discredit in the affair, although it was a serious 
matter in those days to marry a minor against her father's 
wishes. Anne More was a niece of Lord Ellesmere's second 
wife; and, as the daughter of Sir George More of Losely, 
was above the young secretary in wealth and station. Sir 
George was imprudent in leaving the young people together 
in his sister's household, and very insulting when Donne dared 
to ask for an alliance with his family. In short Sir George 
played the part of the irate father to perfection; had his new 
son-in-law, with his friend, Christopher Brooke, and his 
brother, who had participated in the marriage ceremony, 
committed to prison, and procured Donne's dismissal from 
the services of the Lord Chancellor, thus destroying once 
and for all his prospects in diplomacy. It mattered little 
that Sir George later repented, when he found that Donne was 
neither penniless nor without friends. Although he sought 
to undo the work of his passion and to reinstate his son-in-law 
with the chancellor. Lord Ellesmere replied that he had 
"parted with a friend and such a secretary as was fitter to 
serve a king than a subject; yet that, though he was unfeignedly 
sorry for what he had done, it was inconsistent with his place 
and credit to discharge and readmit servants at the request 
of passionate petitioners. " The young people suffered from 
narrowness of means and worry for years. Children came 
to increase their needs; and sickness and death visited them. 
Donne's own health was always precarious and he dated many 
of his letters "from my hospital at Micham. " Yet even in 
these times of depressed fortune, Donne was not without 
friends. Though young Sir Thomas Egerton had died in 
Ireland meanwhile. Sir Francis Wooley, whom Donne had 
also met as a shipmate on the Cadiz expedition, now be- 
friended him. A tender friendship also subsisted between 
Donne and the Herberts, whom he had first met when their 
admirable mother was residing at Oxford for the education 
of Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and George, 
the devotional poet, then a little lad. To these years (as 
many letters which have been preserved attest) belong the 
foundations also of Donne's enduring friendships with Sir 



"BIATHANATOS" 363 

Henry Goodere and with that engaging and munificent patron 
of poetry and learning, Lucy Countess of Bedford. Later 
Sir Robert Drury offered Donne and his family a home with 
him in his splendid mansion beyond Temple Bar. As to 
his marriage, it turned out ideal in its happiness and, when 
his beloved wife died, he cherished her memory. 

It was during these years of waiting and intellectual de- 
pression that Donne wrote his strange prose treatise, Biathan- 
atos, "a. declaration of that paradox or thesis that self- 
hofhicide is not so naturally sin that it may never be otherwise. " 
We can see in this subject what were some of the ponderings 
of this dialectic mind in a time of desperate fortune. This 
work, though kn^own to his nearest friends, was not printed 
during Donne's life; and in a letter accompanying a man- 
uscript of it sent to a friend much later, Donne describes it 
as "a misinterpretable subject . . . written by Jack 
.Donne and not by Dr. Donne"; and adds: "Preserve it for 
me if I live; and if I die, I only forbid it the press and the 
fire." Biathanatos has been described as "a literary curi- 
osity — a tour de force, unique in English literature, a survival 
oFthe old dialectic disputations, carried on strictly according 
tojthe^rules of syllogisticjreason, which the medieval schoolmen 
loved so well. "^ 

The steps by which Donne was drawn more and more 
into the religious controversies of his day we need not follow. 
Icrnatius his Conclave is a fierce little satire in Latin and 
English and decidedly wanting in good taste. It was written 
about 1608 and is alone sufficient to attest the author's com- 
plete severance from the Jesuit influences of his youth. Donne 
was apparently well acquainted with Bacon and may have 
been one of "the good pens that forsake me not" that Bacon 
kept busy in the revision and Latinizing of his works. At 
some time prior to 16 10, Donne became secreatry to Lord Hay, 
afterwards Earl of Carlisle, who was at the moment high in 
the royal favor. This brought Donne into closer contact 
with the king, and a happy argument on the question of the 
oath of allegiance by Donne in the king's presence elicited 
the royal command that he put the case in writing. The 



364 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

Pseudo Martyr, 16 10, was the result, a work that gained an 
immediate popularity and confirmed King James in his 
determination that Donne should enter the church. This 
Donne was long reluctant to do from certain honest scruples 
and from a fear lest his motives might suffer misconstruction. _ 
There was perhaps another reason. With all his theological 
learning, Donne was a man of large and tolerant ideas. "You 
know," he writes to Sir Henry Goodere, "I never fettered 
or imprisoned the word religion; . . , immuring it in 
a Rome, or a Wittenberg, or a Geneva." The Christian 
sects, he continues, "are all virtually beams of one sun, and 
wheresoever they find clay hearts, they harden them and 
moulder them to dust. . . . They are not so contrary 
as the north and south poles; . . . they are connatural 
pieces of one circle. " At last the king became importunate. 
Donne was ordained in 1615. No one knowing the man can 
hold his decision in anything but respect. A year later Donne 
became one of the royal chaplains; and in 16 17, Dean of 
St. Paul's. He was a great and eloquent preacher, and a 
man of sweet and fervent piety. His ministrations, his 
sanctity, and his charity, all can be read in Walton's incom- 
parable Life. Donne died in 1626, 

There are more mistakes prevalent about Donne as a 
poet than about any one of even approximately equal rank. 
The first is the notion that Donne was a late Jacobean or 
Caroline writer, contemporary as a poet^with Cowley. This 
error arises from the accident that the earliest extant edition 
of Donne's poetry is posthumous and dates 1633. Cowley's 
Poetical Blossoms, the appropriately named budding poetry of 
a precocious boy of thirteen, appeared in the same year. 
Donne would have been sixty, if alive. Without entering 
into the clear evidences which are at hand for all to use, Donne 
is.^an JEli:z3,t>ethan in his po.etry in the strictest acceptation of 
that terrn, the forerunner of a remarkable movement, not 
soon assimilated or even imitated by his immediate contem- 
poraries. 

A more serious error is that which has arisen out of the 
term "metaphysical school of poetry." The word "jnfti- 



"THE METAPHYSICAL SCHOOL" 365 

aphysics" was first associated, with the poetry of Donne by 
'Dryden in his Discourse on Satire; ^inA^g^iy^s^^tXfC^zx^td 
vvith imitating Donne, which it is not to be questioned that 
he did. Although the mention of Donne is purely incidental, 
he is praised for "variety, multiplicity and choiceness of 
thought. " Now this passage fell under the eye of the great 
Dr. Samuel Johnson when he was writing his "Life 'of Cowley" 
in The Lives of the English Poets. He expanded it into a 
sonorous critical dictum in which the word "metaphysical" 
was extended from an incidental trait of Donne and his late 
imitator, Cowley, to the distinguishing characteristic of a 
whole "school" of poetry; in which this "school" was thrown 
into violent contrast as "wits" with real poets, and in which 
only one thing was omitted concerning Donne, and that was 
the "variety, multiplicity and choiceness of thought" with 
which the judicious Dryden had credited him. This famous 
deliverance of Dr. Johnson's is a glaring example of the spe- 
cies of criticism which is worked up out of the critical dicta 
of others, a mystery unhappily not confined to the age of the 
Georges. We may give over expectation of a time when 
popular histories of literature will not discuss "the metaphys- 
ical poets" in eloquent passages expanded from Dr. Johnson's 
"Life of Cowley," as Dr. Johnson expanded the incidental 
words of Dryden. The instinct that bids each critic follow 
his predecessor has determined once and for all that the poet- 
ical indiscretions of the saintly Dean of St. Paul's, perpetrated 
thirty-five years before, shall be linked to all eternity to the 
clever imitations of a school-boy fifty years his junior. But 
let us turn from the discouraging negative function of crit- 
icism, the detection of error, to its positive mission, the affir- 
mation — if we may be so fortunate as to find it — of truth. 

The salient qualities of the poetry of Donne are, fore- 
most, a contempt for mere form, shown in his disregard of 
the graces of diction as such^ alliteration, choice of words 
for sound or smoothness, and pther like tricks of the traded 
Neither harshness of sound nor violence to meter deter him; 
and he repeats and uses the plain word where necessary to 
the force and rhetoric of the thought. 



366 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

Some man unworthy to be possessor 

Of old or new love, himself being false or weak 
Thought his pain and shame would be the lesser, 
If on womankind he might his anger wreak. 
And thence the law did grow, 
One might but one man know; 
But are other creatures so ? 

It was with reference to such a line as the fourth that Jonson 
observed to Drummond that Donne "deserved hanging for 
not keeping accent. " And yet there will be found a rhetorical 
value in even the roughness of Donne. His stanzas are often 
elaborate and always original, they are fitting to the subject 
in hand. Moreover, the roughness of Donne has been exag- 
gerated. Secondly, Donne's contempt of form carried with 
it an absolute discarding of the poetical apparatus of the 
past. The gods of Greece and Rome dwell not with him, 
and though abundantly learned he scorns allusion or imitation, 
representing in this the very antithesis of Jonson. Donne's 
illustrations are powerful for their homeliness, vividness, and 
Originality. He bids a lover ride "till age snow white hairs 
on thee." He craves "to talk with some old lover's ghost 
that died before the god of love was born"; Christ is addressed 
as the "strong ram that batterest heaven for me." Once 
more, Donne is not a nature poet,^ his work discloses no love 
of animals or of flowers. The forms of this world were nothing 
to him; he neither painted nature nor sought nature for his 
model. There is, for example, a strange absence of the sense 
of color in the poetry of Donne. When he uses color words 
at all, they are crude and perfunctory. On the other hand 
the abstractions of light and darkness are always before him. 
The relations of men to each other were likewise matters sealed. 
There is a completer absence of dramatic instinct in Donne 
than in any poet of his age, The concrete was nothing to 
him except as illustrative of the abstract. The reason for 
this, as for his want of an appreciation of nature, is to be found 
in the intense subjectivity of his poetry. It is related of him 
that he never saw, much less knew personally, the young 
maiden, Elizabeth Drury, whose untimely death he has immor- 



"THE ANATOMY OF THE WORLD" 367 

talized in that strange and fascinating poem, "The Anatomy 
of the World," To him she is a beautiful abstraction, the 
symbol of all that is spiritual, divine, and permanent in this 
passing world. The symbol is not the real thing; the real 
is here the ideal. We must cross into the kindred sphere 
of speculative thought for the glow, the white passion, the 
power and subtlety of this remarkable work; and yet it remains 
poetry, for, however speculative its thought and eloquently 
rhetorical the expression, its real traffic is with the divine 
illusions and phantasmagoria of this world. The person- 
ality of Donne is ever present in his works; but it is not his 
bodily self but the spiritual part of him in these poems, sub- 
limed, if it may be so put, into a universal meaning. Donne 
is himself the spiritual microcosm of the world. With him 
the one is all; and hence to such a man the body is but a veil 
for the soul. He speaks of the body of Elizabeth Drury as 

so pure and thin 
Because it need disguise no thought within, 
'T was but a through-light scarf her mind to enrol 
Or exhalation breathed out of her soul. 

So that 

We understand her sight; her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought 
That one might almost say her body thought. 

To Donne the soul alone is worthy of contemplation whose 
inner harmony is broken by too close a contact with the objec- 
tive world. What seems a confusion of visual ideas really 
has this inner contemplative harmony to one to whom time 
and space are naught. By a natural step Donne "entertains 
a universal, almost Pantheistic faith in the unity and totality 
of his soul with all souls. " In Donne will be found a roman- 
ticism of soul. His lyrics and satires are to be regarded as 
his struggle with sense. The sonnets, epistles, and "Anatomy 
of the World," these are the real Donne, though not alone 
the most poetical of his work. 

Returning, Donne's originality shows itself in his themes 
which are of life, death, everything, and all; whatever he 



368 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

touches he treats as an abstraction. Take for example such 
lines as these, apostrophizing "Strong and long lived Death": 

The earth's face is but thy table; there are set 
Plants, cattle, men, dished for Death to eat. 

Nor will this earth serve him; he sinks the deep 
Where harmless fish monastic silence keep, 
Who (were Death dead) the roes of living sand 
Might sponge that element, and make it land. 
He rounds the air, and breaks the hymnic notes 
In birds'. Heaven's choristers', organic throats. 
Which, if they did not die, might seem to be 
A tenth rank in the heavenly hierarchy. 

His originality is likewise in his style, which in addition to the 
negative qualities already noted displays a totally new range 
/ of imagery derived from science, medicine, law, mathematics, 
astronomy, alchemy, and the chemistry of the day. Not 
"learned eccentric" as some one described the vocabulary 
of Robert Browning at times, nor crammed for the nonce as 
in Jonson's Alchemist, but the natural utterance of a mind 
accustomed to think in technical terms. In Donne's vocab- 
ulary there are many peculiar words, not technicalities, and 
many words repeatedly used with a kind of fondness. His 
must have been one of those minds that form strong associa- 
tions about certain symbols, and use words with a deeper 
significance than can ever reach him who runs as he reads. 
When all has been said, there remains however that quality 
^ ^ by which Donne is chiefly known, namely, his use of conceit. 
Of the conceit, its origin among the imitators of Petrarch, and 
of Sidney's position as the popularizer of extravagant met- 
aphors among the lyrists, we have already heard in this book. 
That the conceit originated with Donne is no longer main- 
tained by those who have knowledge on the subject; but it 
is still held by some that Donne is responsible for its 
prevalence in Jacobean poetry: a position equally untenable. 
The mistake in this whole matter is the general confusion of 
Donne with the "concettists " who preceded him, and who, 
affected more or less by him, followed him. What may be 



THE DONNIAN CONCEIT 369 

true of English concettists in general may not be true of Donne 
in particular and vice versa. The confusion of Donne with 
Gongora is as bad as the confusion of Donne with Lyly. That 
Donne is a concettist is unquestionable. He often employs 
a tjiought which is far-fetched and ingenious rather than of 
natural and obvious meaning. Moreover, it is true of the 
Donnian conceit (in contrast with the hyperbolical conceit of 
Sidney, the ingenuities of Cowley, and the antithetical wit 
of the next, the "classical", age), that the twist with Donne, 
if it may be so called, is in the thought rather than in the 
words. Let us take a typical passage of Donne from a poem 
entitled "The Ecstasy." The theme is of the spiritual nature 
of the ecstasy of love : 

When love with one another so 

Interanimates two souls, 
That abler soul, which thence doth flow, ' 

Defects of loneliness controls. 
We then, who are this new soul, know 

Of what we are composed and made: 
■ For th' atomies, of which we grow, 

Are soul, whom no change can invade. 
But O, alas! so long, so far 

Our bodies why do we forbear ? 
They are ours, though not we; we are 

The intelligences, they the spheres; 
We owe them thanks, because they thus 

Did us to us at first convey. 
Yielded their senses' force to us. 

Nor are dross to us but allay. 
On man heaven's influence works not so, 

But that it first imprints the air; 
For soul into the soul may flow 

Though it to body first repair. 

This passage is subtle, as is the whole poem, almost dia- 
lectic. A keen, sinuous, reasoning mind is playing with its 
powers. Except for the implied personification of the body 
regarded apart from the soul, the language is free from figure; 
there is no confusion of thought. The new soul, the able 
soul, is that which, uniting the strength in the soul of each 



370 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

lover, "controls" loneliness in that union. This new soul 
is indestructible, because composed of the atomies (atoms 
we should say) which, being indivisible and the primal mate- 
rial of all things, are incapable of destruction. There is the 
distinctively Donnian employment of ideas derived from phys- 
ical and speculative science: the "atomies" with their indiv- 
isibility, a term of the physics of the day; the body is the 
"sphere" or superficies which includes within it the soul, a 
term of the old astro-philosophy; the body is not "dross" but 
an "allay," alchemical terms; the "influence" of heaven is the 
use of that word in an astrological sense, meaning "the radia- 
tion of power from the stars in certain positions or collocations 
affecting human actions and destinies;" and lastly, the phrase 
"imprints the air" involves an idea of the old philosophy, 
by which "sensuous perception is explained by effluxes of 
atoms from the things perceived whereby images are produced 
('imprinted') which strike our senses." Donne subtly 
transfers this purely physical conception to the transference 
of divine influence. How different all this is to the earlier 
hyperboles of the Sidneian school, the rhapsodical extravagance 
of Crashaw, or the persistently clever ingenuity of Cowley, 
need be pointed out only to be understood. In Donne, even 
where the conceit in all its ingenuity does exist, it is again 
and again raised out of its class by a certain fervor, sincerity^ 
and applicability that not only condones its^ jextravagance 
but justifies it. Such is the famous image of the compass, 
best known of the Donnian conceits, yet none the less worthy 
of quotation once more. It occurs in a poem entitled "A 
Valediction Forbidding Mourning," written to his beloved 
wife, and runs thus : 

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 

Though I must go, endure not yet * 

A breach, but an expansion, 
Like gold to airy thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so 

As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show 

To move, but doth, if th' other do. 



THE INFLUENCE OF DONNE 371 

And though it in the center sit, 

Yet, when the other far doth roam, 
It leans, and hearkens after it, 

And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must. 

Like th' other foot, obliquely run; 
Thy firmness makes my circle just. 

And makes me end where I begun. 

A letter remains extant bearing date December, 16 14, 
addressed by Donne to his friend Sir Henry Goodere in which 
he writes : 

One thing now I must tell you; but so softly that I am loth to 
hear myself, and so softly that if that good lady (Lady Bedford) 
were in the room with you and this letter, she might not hear. It is 
that I am brought to a necessity of printing my poems, and address- 
ing them to my Lord Chamberlain. This I mean to do forthwith; not 
for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies. . . . I must 
do this as a valediction to the world before I take orders . . . 
and I would be just to my written words to Lord Harington to write 
nothing after that. 

This edition, if ever actually printed, has perished; and, save 
for this mention, there is no word of it. We may believe that 
Donne bade a final farewell to his Muse two years before the 
death of Shakespeare. Even the divine poems, which include 
a few sonnets, hymns, transcriptions of the psalms, and the 
like, were doubtless all of them written before his ordination. 
Of the influence of Donne on what came after little need 
be said here. The poets that survived Shakespeare to write 
into the reign of King Charles — to name only the most im- 
portant — were Jonson, Drayton, Chapman, Browne, and 
the Fletchers. Of these, the last three were wholly Spense- 
rians, and Drayton remained to the end at least half such. 
Chapman went his ample, fantastic way and, so far as we can 
make out, wrote less and less after the completion of his 
translation of the Odessey^ published in the year of Shake- 
speare's death. But Jonson rated Donne at his due and a 
friendship honorable to both subsisted between them, Donne 



372 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

penning more than one poetical epistle to Jonson. To Donne, 
on the other hand, Jonson sent his Epigrams with verses 
declaring, 

If I find but one 

Marked by thy hand, and with the better stone, 

My title's sealed. 

In another epigram Jonson trumpeted his opinion of his 
friend in lines beginning: 

Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse, 

Who to thy one, all other brains refuse; 

Whose every work, of thy most early wit. 

Came forth example and remains so ytt. 

Jonson even paid the tribute of imitating what he conceived 
to be the Donnian conceit in a little poem sent to Drummond 
on "a Lover's Dust, Made Sand for an Hour-glass." But 
the great dramatic satirist was much too self-centered and 
independent to be affected by Donne or any one else, when 
he had once laid his certain course, by theoretical compass 
and classical chart, to the port of poetical celebrity. Among 
the more important younger lyrists Drummond published the 
first part of his Poems in i6i6, having previously appeared 
first in print three years earlier in Tears on the Death of Moel- 
iades, a pastoral name for Prince Henry. Thomas Carew 
was but twenty in 1616; but Robert Herrick and George Her- 
bert were both Carew's seniors, the one by five years, the 
latter by three. Both must have begun to write poetry by 
this time; but Herrick is the truest of the lyrical "sons of Ben" 
and bettered his father's hard if noble favor with a beauty 
all his own. Herbert remains the most certain of the succes- 
sors of Donne to be affected immediately by his influences 
in poetry; and Herbert, in his youth, as we have seen, was 
personally intimate with Donne. A recent editor claims for 
Herbert that "he devised the religious love-lyric and he intro- 
duced structure into the short poem. "^ With the long line 
of lyrists before us and the wealth of their stanzaic variety 
and invention, this last is obviously too large a claim, but in 
^G. H. Palmer, The Life and Works of George Herbert, i, 57. 



DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN 373 

view of the inventiveness of Donne as to stanza and the intensity 
of the passion of his secular love-songs, it may well be sur- 
mised that the poetry of Donne was George Herbert's imme- 
diate poetical inspiration and model. To Herbert, even more 
certainly, Donne transmitted his own peculiar use of the 
conceit, though Herbert is often quaintly ingenious where 
Donne flashes unexpected illumination by the original bias 
of his mind. 

William Drummond, known as Drummond of Hawthorn- 
den from his estate near Edinburgh, was born in 1585, the 
son of John Drummond, gentleman-usher to James before 
he became King of England and knighted by that monarch 
in 1603. The poet Drummond was educated at the University 
of Edinburgh and in France, and joined his father at the 
London court of the new Scottish king at the most impression- 
able time of a young man's life. In several extant letters 
which Drummond wrote home to friends in Scotland about this 
time, he shows his interest and pleasure in the pageantry 
and ceremonial of the court. But a list of his reading, also 
extant, discloses him likewise busily engaged with poetry 
and romance. His countryman Alexander's Aurora, Euphues^ 
the Arcadia, and the Diana of Montemayor; Love's Labor' s 
Lost, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece 
and The Passionate Pilgrim were among the books read by 
this Scottish youth in 1606; and later we hear of many French 
and Italian writers : of Daniel, and Davison's Poetical Rhap- 
sody and (most significant) the Arcadia, read a second time. 
In 16 10, on the death of his father, Drummond gave up defi- 
nitely his intent to follow the law and retired to his beauti- 
ful estate of Hawthornden to devote himself to poetry and 
scholarly leisure. It was there that he planned to lead the 
lady, who had inspired much of his sincere and beautiful 
poetry and whose memory, on her untimely death in 1615, 
before their marriage, he cherished for so many years. It 
was at Hawthornden, four years later, that Drummond enter- 
tained Ben Jonson on that worthy's pilgrimage afoot to 
Edinburgh; and doubtless Drummond's influence and appre- 
ciation of Jonson's poetry and reputation at the English court 



374 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

procured for the English laureate the freedom of the city and 
other attentions which the citizens of Edinburgh accorded 
him. 

The poetry of Drummond that made his repute is comprised 
in the little quarto of 1616. It consists of songs and sonnets, 
addressed for the most part to the lady to whom he was be- 
trothed; of a collection of madrigals and epigrams, doubtless 
the earliest of his poetizing; and of a series of "spiritual 
poems," as the phrase went, entitled Urania, almost certainly 
the most recently written. Drummond's pattern and example 
is Sir Philip Sidney and his inspiration, Petrarch. To quote 
from a fragment printed with the Poems and called A Char- 
acter of Several Authors: "Among our English poets Petrarch 
is imitated, nay surpassed in some things in matter and man- 
ner: in matter none approach him to Sidney." Later he 
continues: "Donne, among the Anacreontic lyrics, is second 
to none, and far from all second. ... I think, if he 
would, he might easily be the best epigrammatist we have 
found in English. " With the mention of Alexander, who is 
praised in this passage as only one Scotchman can praise 
another, we complete the list of the chief poetical influences on 
Drummond. But inspired by the work of other men though 
he was, this new poet of the last days of Shakespeare was far 
from devoid of a sweetness and gentle originality all his own. 
This sonnet, while perhaps not among the very best of Drum- 
mond, strikes the note of sincerity that marks all his threnodies 
for his lost Aurastella, as he somewhere calls her: 

As, in a dusky and tempestuous night, 

A star is wont to spread her locks of gold, 

And while her pleasant rays abroad are roU'd, 

Some spiteful cloud doth rob us of her sight; 

Fair soul in this black age so shin'd thou bright, 

And made all eyes with wonder thee behold. 

Till ugly Death, depriving us of light, 

In his grim misty arms thee did enfold. 

Who more shall vaunt true beauty here to see ? 

What hope doth more in any heart remain, 

That such perfections shall his reason rein. 



DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN • 375 

If beauty, with thee born, too died with thee ? 
World, plain no more of Love, nor count his harms; 
With his pale trophies Death hath hung his arms. 

A greater originality characterizes this serious little poem, 
which the author denominates a madrigal: 

This life, which seems so fair. 

Is like a bubble blown up in the air 

By sporting children's breath, 

Who chase it everywhere, 

And strive who can most motion it bequeath: 

And though it sometime seem of its own might. 

Like to an eye of gold, to be fix'd there. 

And firm to hover in that empty height, 

That only is because it is so light. 

But in that pomp it doth not long appear; 

For even when most admir'd, it in a thought, 

As swell'd from nothing, doth dissolve in nought. 

Drummond is not usually as free of conceit as these two 
quotations would seem to indicate; and his conceits, where 
he yields to hyperbole, are those of Petrarch, or rather Sid- 
ney, never those of Donne. Drummond loved the sonorous 
proper names of classical mythology as deeply as did Milton 
after him; and he delighted, like Milton again, in the recondite 
allusions involving them. Thus Pythagoras is the Samian; 
Boreas is Orithyia's lover; Venus, the Idalian star or the fair 
Erycine. Achelous' horn stands for a cornucopia; nightin- 
gales are "Pandionian birds," and birds in general, "Am- 
phions of the trees. " Equally dear to Drummond are unusual 
poetical words: brandon, cynoper, ramage, decore, panisks; 
and his originality is less in new figures than in a loving shaping 
of old material into a something different, yet reminiscent, 
like a faded fragrance, of some fair thing that we have known 
before. Drummond welcomed King James to Scotland, in 
161 7, in a panegyric of much poetic value called The River 
Forth Feasting. This act of the courtier he repeated with 
failing power, save for its adulation, in the Entertainment of 
Charles when that monarch, too, visited Scotland in 1633. 
In the year of the Shakespeare folio, 1623, Drummond pub- 



376 DONNE AND THE LYRICAL POETS 

lished a book of devotional poetry of great beauty, entitled 
Flowers of Sion, in which he displays, as in his prose essay, 
J Cypress Grove (a treatise upon death, published in the 
same volume), a singularly Platonic type of Christian phil- 
osophy. Drummond's later life shows him interested in 
theoretical mechanics and seeking patents for the invention of 
various contrivances, chiefly warlike instruments. He was 
a giver of books to his university, Edinburgh, and was drawn 
into the vortex of the unhappy political controversies of the 
day towards the end of his life. He died in 1649. 

To return in conclusion to Donne, it is somewhat discon- 
certing to find an author whom, not unlike to Walter Savage 
Landor in our own late century, the critics can not glibly 
classify as the founder of a school or the product of a perfectly 
obvious series of literary influences. Donne is a poet of this 
difficult type. For, just as Shakespeare touched life and man- 
kind at all points, and, absorbing the light of his time, gave 
it forth a hundred-fold, so Donne, withdrawn almost entirely 
from the influences affecting his contemporaries, shone and 
glowed with a strange light all his own. Orthodoxy — or 
rather a restoration to orthodoxy — as to John Donne de- 
mands that we recognize him in his poetry as an Elizabethan, 
as strictly such as Shakespeare, far more so than Jonson; 
that while we grant Donne to be a concettist he was such from 
the originality and natural bias of his mind, not from affected 
singularity or a striving after effect; that his strange and 
fascinating poetry, so caviare to the general, yields a true and 
rich reward to him who will seek with labor and true faith; 
and, lastly, that Donne, next to Spenser and Jonson, exercised 
the most potent influence of his time on English poetry. 
Donne's highest contribution to literature, like Shakespeare's 
in a very different way, depends on that deeper element of 
modern poetry which we call poetic insight, a power in his 
case which, proceeding by means of the clash of ideas familiar 
with ideas remote, flashes light and meaning into what has 
hitherto appeared mere commonplace. No one, in short, 
excepting Shakespeare, with Sidney, Greville, and Jonson in 
lesser degree, has done so much to develop intellectualized 



THE TRUE PLACE OF DONNE 377 

emotion in the Elizabethan lyric as Donne. In comparison 
with all this the notions about a "metaphysical school," even 
a "rhetorical school of poetry" and the fiction of a fantastical 
prince of concettists, leading a generation of poetlings deliber- 
ately astray, become vagaries of criticism comparatively 
unimportant. Donne deserves the verdict of his friend, Ben 
Jonson, who called him "the first poet in the world in some 
things. " But Donne is the last poet to demand a proselyting 
zeal of his devotees, and all those who have learned to love 
his witching personality will agree to the charming sentiment 
of his faithful adorer, Izaak Walton, when he says: "Though 
I must omit to mention divers persons, . . . friends 
of Sir Henry Wotton; yet I must not omit to mention of a 
love that was there begun betwixt him and Dr. Donne, some- 
time Dean of Saint Paul's; a man of whose abilities I shall 
forbear to say anything, because he who is of this nation, and 
pretends to learning or ingenuity, and is ignorant of Dr, 
Donne, deserves not to know him. " 



CHAPTER XX 

DRAMA AT THE UNIVERSITIES, THE PASTORAL 
DRAMA AND THE MASQUE 

FROM Chaucer's time to Spenser's, English poetry owed 
most to the court. This we have seen in various lyri- 
cal forms, in fiction, and in the pastoral, to name no more. 
The old sacred drama had in it much of the folk; but when 
modern drama arose to succeed it, the first influences were 
those that belonged specifically to the society that surrounded 
the sovereign; and however soon these were rivaled and sur- 
passed by the larger utterances of the popular drama they 
continued to develop in their own way, and what is more, to 
exert a decided influence on the popular drama besides. Thus 
Lyly was tutor to the young Shakespeare in comedy; Peele 
transferred his talents from the college and the court to the 
boards of the London playhouses; and Kyd, a satellite revolv- 
ing in an outer orbit of the charmed Sidneian circle, fur- 
nished popularized Senecan tragedy to the same stage. It is 
the business of this chapter to trace the drama as it flourished at 
court after the time of Lyly, and to treat, in connection with 
this, the academic drama which in nature is of close kindred. 
Scarcely anything secularly dramatic in England is as old 
as the practice of the performance of Latin plays at schools 
and colleges. It was out of this custom that such a play as 
Ralph Roister Doister came to be written and perhaps Gammer 
Gurton as well; for the substitution of an original play, Latin 
or English, was an obvious enough departure from the older 
acting of a comedy of Terence or Plautus. These perform- 
ances were early used to celebrate important occasions and 
came to be a recognized feature of royal progresses and enter- 
tainments of other important personages. Thus in the year 
of Shakespeare's birth, when Elizabeth visited Cambridge, 
she was regaled not only with "scholastical exercises in phil- 

378 



ELIZABETHAN COLLEGE PLAYS 379 

osophy, physics, and divinity," but with comedies and trage- 
dies at night "set forth partly by the whole university and 
partly by the students of King's College. " Similar festivities 
attended the queen's visit to Oxford, two years later, and 
many a forgotten name, such as Preston, Edwards, Gager, 
and Legge, has been preserved in the complaisant accounts 
of these old theatrical revels. Among men to become known 
to the stage, Peele began his career, as we have seen, in college 
plays at Oxford; and Nash narrowly escaped expulsion from 
Cambridge for a libelous Latin comedy. A satirical quality 
is almost invariably characteristic of the college play. The 
satire is for the most part dependent on the close and intimate 
relations of college life and it assumed familiarity, as it had 
a right to do, with the classical education in vogue at the time 
and smacks, at times to excess, of the school and the commons. 
A famous play, Pedantius, of Cambridge in the early eighties, 
obtrudes an absurd Ciceronian (by some believed a take-off 
on Gabriel Harvey) into the midst of a comedy of Plautine 
intrigue; and Bellum Grammaticale, a contemporary piece at 
Oxford, elaborates after a medieval model an ingenious alle- 
gory of the parts of speech. At other times the immemorial 
feud between town and gown becomes the subject of dramatic 
treatment as in the now lost Cluh Law, at Cambridge, in which 
certain townsmen were forcibly compelled to view themselves 
outrageously lampooned in their own costumes, which had 
been previously borrowed by the mischievous collegians with 
that nefarious end in view. 

Among strictly Elizabethan academic plays none are more 
prominent or interesting than the trilogy known as "the 
Parnassus plays, " the work of an unknown author and acted 
at St. John's College, Oxford, in the interval covered by the 
years 1598 to 1602. The first of these is entitled The Pil- 
grimage to Parnassus. It details the career of a couple of 
youths in their journey, by way of the well-known trivium, 
through "the island of logique, " "the pleasant groves of 
rhetorique," and the harsher climate of philosophy, until 
they reach "the laurel shady grove" upon Parnassus' top. 
They are not without adventures by the way with the tavern- 



38o DRAMA AT THE UNIVERSITIES 

er, the Puritan, and other typical personages of college life. 
This production is not much more than an interlude in length. 
But it was received so well that in a second part, The Return 
from Parnassus, the author undertook a far more elaborate 
presentation of "the progress of learning towards a settlement 
in life" in which he represents the same heroes, seeking pre- 
ferment and rebuffed and abused on every hand. In. a final 
play, the second part of The Return from Parnassus, the 
theme is still further amplified, and abuses of bribery and 
favoritism in the presentations of church livings are held up 
to the light. The disheartening moral is that there is no place 
for merit and learning in this world, unless both be supported 
by station, wealth, or at least by sycophancy. Incidentally 
these comedies exhibit several typical figures cleverly satirized, 
such as GuUio, the fool of fashion and patron of the poets, 
whose cheerful and impudent appropriation of the verses of 
other men's making, especially Shakespeare's, attests both 
the great poet's repute and the attitude of the superior young 
collegians towards his poetry. Gullio is exhibiting to Ingen- 
ioso his "vein in courting": 

Gullio. Pardon, fair lady, though sick-thoughted Gullio makes 
amain unto thee, and like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo thee. 

Ingenioso {aside). We shall have nothing but pure Shakespeare 
and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theaters. 

Gull. Pardon me, moi mittressa, ast am a gentleman, the moon 
in comparison with thy bright hue a mere slut, Antony's Cleopatra 
a black-browed milk-maid, Helen a dowdy. 

Ingen. {aside), Mark, Romeo and Juliet! O monstrous theft! 
I think he will run through a whole book of Samuel Daniel's. 

Gull. Thrice fairer than myself — thus I began — 
The god's fair riches, sweet above compare. 
Stain to all nymphs^ more lovely than a man. 
More white and red than doves and roses are! 
Nature that made thee with herself had strife, 
Saith that the world hath ending with they life. 

Ingen. Sweet Master Shakespeare! 

Gull. As I am a scholar. 
These arms of mine are long and strong withal, 
Thus elms by vines are compassed ere they fall. 



THE PARNASSUS TRILOGY 381 

Ingen. Faith, gentleman, your reading is wonderful in our 
English poets! 

Gull. Sweet mistress, I vouchsafe to take some of their words 
and apply them to mine own matters by scholastical invention. 
Report then upon thy credit; is not my vein in courting gallant and 
honorable ? 

It may be surmised from the allusions of these plays that 
these "young sprouts of Apollo" regarded Venus and Adonis 
as the work on which chiefly rested the contemporary fame of 
Shakespeare. It was Ovidian in subject and manner, and 
it, like Lucrece, had been published by the regular channels 
and becomingly dedicated to lordship. Of the dramas, they 
were not quite so sure. The popular actors, Burbage and 
Kemp, are represented among the characters in the last of 
these plays, and doubtless their appearance and their manner- 
isms of speech and action were divertingly mimicked then as 
our popular actors are at times mimicked by the collegians 
of to-day. But though the world was ringing with the tri- 
umphs of Shakespeare and Jonson, the acknowledgment 
of their superiority is put into the ignorant mouth of 
Kemp, the morris-dancer, in the certainly satirical words: 
"Few of the university pen plays well; they smell too much 
of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and 
talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here 's 
our Shakespeare puts them all down, aye, and Ben Jonson, 
too. " 

Few things are more persistent in the strictly academic 
plays than their employment of allegory. The minuteness 
of the parallels in the old Bellum Grammaticale would do 
credit to Priscian or William Lilly; and even more elaborate 
are the allegorical details o^ Lingua, a fluently written comedy 
by one Tomkins of Trinity College, Cambridge, often acted 
and in print by the year 1607. Therein the tongue is appro- 
priately conceived as a feminine personage possessed of the 
aggressiveness and activity of a modern "suff'ragette," who 
demands, for herself, full recognition as one of the senses. 
In an extraordinary number of scenes and with an aston- 
ishing number of characters, this struggle for recognition is 



382 DRAMA AT THE UNIVERSITIES 

detailed to the end which we regret to say was Lingua's dis- 
comfiture. The age of James was not the twentieth century. 
Lingua is an ably written drama and full of ingenious wit. 
It may be recommended to the reader who would learn how 
sumptuously and with what variety the personages of a pri- 
vate play were costumed in these old times. This drama of 
Lingua was acted at the house of an uncle of Oliver Crom- 
well, in 1603, to welcome King James on his progress up to 
London. And an absurd story, of later cavalier invention, 
makes Oliver himself the actor who impersonated the char- 
acter, Tactus; and, learning in the play what it was to wear a 
crown, he bent all his energies thereafter to acquire one. 
Oliver was four years old in 1603. 

But we may feel sure that, except on grand occasions 
when the colleges were visited by royalty, the academ.ic play 
was a much simpler affair. A pleasing little burlesque, 
called Narcissus, served to enliven the Christmas festivities 
at St. John's College,Oxford, in 1602. In its persons, dialogue, 
and setting especially, we meet with as frank a satire on con- 
temporary amateur theatricals as is Shakespeare's represen- 
tation of Bottom and his "base mechanicals" of The Mid- 
summer-Night's Dream. So, too, the several plays of 1607 
at the same college, when Oxford seems for the nonce to have 
gone theatrically mad, were performed apparently on a stage 
erected in the refectory by pushing the tables together; and 
the properties were the fewest. An interesting contemporary 
account of these festivities informs us of the whole manner of 
their proceedings: how the collegians selected a Christmas 
prince who was installed with egregious solemnity and an 
appropriate Latin play; how tragedies in Latin and comedies 
for the younger sort in English were devised, rehearsed, and 
acted; and of their troubles in rehearsal, the accidents and 
triumphs of performances, and many like matters. Few of 
these lighter amateur productions are possessed of any lit- 
erary, much less poetic, merit. The one dramatist whose 
work was strictly academic, to rise to literary distinction, was 
Thomas Randolph, and he belongs to the reign of King 
Charles. But these academic productions of the time of 



LATIN AND ENGLISH TRAGEDY 383 

Elizabeth and James are neither without their value nor with- 
out a deeper interest for their relations, though often remote, 
to their sister plays on the popular stage. 

Concomitantly with satiric farce and allegory, Latin 
tragedy, with its imitation in English, continued to flourish 
at both the universities. In subject-matter these plays were 
preferably taken from classical history or myth. Two of 
the most famous Latin tragedies in their day were Roxana, 
1592, the work of William Alabaster, praised for his poetry 
by Spenser, and Nero by Dr. Matthew Gwinne, printed in 
1603. This latter tragedy, which is closely written and of 
great length, is rigorously grounded on the recognized classical 
authorities for the history of that degenerate Roman emperor, 
and owes its existence as completely as Jonson's Sejanus to 
Tacitus and Suetonius. Alabaster's Roxana, on the other hand, 
has recently been discovered to be little more than a translation 
of one of the dramas of the Italian, Luigi Groto. But Italian 
sources such as these were more frequently employed by the 
collegians for comedy and a long list of plays — few of them 
rising above mediocrity — can be made out for both colleges, 
levying on what may be called Plautus Italianized. Such a 
play, to name only one, is LcbUo, 1590, a translation of Gl'In- 
gannati of Giovanni della Porta and a suggested source of 
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night; another translation from the 
same Italian dramatist is Tomkins' Alhumazor, 1615, which 
Dryden mixed up for want of information as to its source with 
Jonson's Alchemist; a third is the celebrated Ignoramus, by far 
the most popular of all the academic comedies of its time. 
Ignoramus is the work of George Ruggle. The plot, which 
is far from wanting either in cleverness or wit, revolves about 
the character who supplies the title and whose coarse scheming, 
blundering, and jargon of dog Latin, bad English, and law 
French proclaim him the very embodiment of blatant, militant 
Philistinism. Ignoramus was acted for the first time at Cam- 
bridge before James in 16 15 with a cast chosen, so Oxford 
hinted, with at least as much care to the social relations of 
the actors as to their histrionic abilities; and its success with 
King James (who journeyed up to Cambridge a second time 



384 THE PASTORAL DRAMA 

to see the comedy repeated) was, we fear, as much due to its 
broad obscenities as to any designed encouragement of learn- 
ing and the arts that governed the purposes of that learned 
monarch. 

Further into the strictly academic drama our present 
design does not lead us. In Gwinne's Nero, English-Latin 
tragedy reached its height; Ignoramus was surpassed in wit 
and in decency by many following plays. The restrictive 
sphere of satire and allusion in such plays lent little to the 
popular comedy of manners which had long since outstripped 
it. The restrained and narrow rhetoric of Senecan tragedy 
was equally a thing of the past on the stage of London. On 
the other hand, plays at college were open from the first to 
outside influences, more especially those of the court than to 
those of the popular drama. Of the court influences on the 
academic drama the most important by far was pastoral; 
and we turn now to the consideration of pastoral drama during 
the period of this book. 

It will be recalled that in a previous chapter a succession 
of literary fashions, so to speak, was noted as characteristic 
of the latter half of Elizabeth's reign. There was the time of 
the sonnet, for example, and that when lyrics were more 
specifically written to be set to music. Preceding both of 
these was the period of the pastoral, which tinged with its 
artificial ideals and its preciosity nearly every form of current 
literature. Thus the pastoral is rather a way of viewing nature 
and reproducing it in art than, in any strict sense, a variety 
of literature, much less a form of poetry. Quite enough has 
been said of the origin of the pastoral in the chapter which 
deals with its lyric form. In the pastoral, be it remembered 
(lest we become critical where criticism is unfair), we leave 
the actual world behind us to hark back to that golden age 
so besung by the poets, to dwell in the land where all swains 
are lovers and all nymphs are fair; where their work is the 
knotting of rushes or the piping of melodies, their play, the 
prettiest of innocent love-making — but who knows not 
Arcadia, though his life may no more have compassed it than 



"THE SAD SHEPHERD" 385 

his lips have tasted the springs of Helicon or his feet attempted 
the steeps of Parnassus ? 

In Italy the step from pastoral romance to pastoral drama 
was soon taken by Tasso, whose Aminta, acted in 1573, was 
translated by Englishmen in the eighties; twenty years later 
came Guarini's // Pastor Fido. But well before either of 
these famous regular pastoral dramas, English poets had 
employed the pastoral notion in masque-like devices and enter- 
tainments. Gascoigne used such figures among others in his 
speeches to Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1575, and Sidney 
in his Lady of May, three years later, gives us a lively little 
pastoral interlude. In Peele's court play, The Arraignment of 
Paris, and equally in several of the dramas of Lyly, we have 
a pastoral atmosphere breathed by the gods of Greece and 
Rome, incongruous to none but a classical purist who has 
forgotten intervening history. But in such a drama as Lyly's 
Lovers Metamorphosis, the manners are pure Arcadia. The 
pastoral as an element entered into English comedies in other 
combinations. A "court element," as it has been called, 
combines with the pastoral in certain well-known plays; such, 
for example, as Mucedorus, an exceedingly popular little 
comedy, attributed to Lodge. In the inferior Thracian Won- 
der, much as in Sidney's Arcadia, the combination of the 
pastoral is with the heroic. More interesting is the contrast 
of ideas that arises from a combination of the conventions of 
the Italian pastoral with the English ideal of free rural life, 
embodied in the tales of the doings of Robin Hood. Such a 
drama as this Ben Jonson had in mind in the fragment of 
The Sad Shepherd, written we may feel certain, whatever the 
date, at least after the regular English pastoral plays, of which 
more shortly. Here a tale of Robin and his Maid Marian is 
interwoven with one of iEglamour, Mellifleur,and Amie, names 
redolent with the pastoral ideals; and huntsmen and shepherds 
rub against Puck-Hairy and the Witch of Paplewick. The 
robust English nature of Jonson could never have realized 
the rococo landscape of Arcadia or the tinted shepherdesses 
that dwell simperingly therein. In less striking contrast, 



386 THE PASTORAL DRAMA 

these two elements appear once more in As Tou Like It. The 
uhimate source of Shakespeare's plot, as is well known, is 
the medieval Tale ofGamelyn, a plain English story of outlawry 
and vengeance. Into it there enters no woman's figure; and, 
in the end,the unjust eldest brother is slain and the two younger 
divide the estate. Lodge translated the story from England 
to the Arcadian forest of Ardenne, transformed "the maister 
outlawe" to the banished King of France, turned Gamelyn 
into the romantic lover, Rosader, and invented Rosalynd to 
match him, conveying a group of shepherds and shepherdesses 
into the forest for the human setting. Lodge's Rosalynd is 
more truly pastoral than any play of Lyly. Shakespeare in 
As Tou Like It restored the English setting and introduced 
his veritable English country, folk, Audrey and William, beside 
the pastoral figures of Silvius and Phoebe; using pastoral 
love-making in the delicious wooing of Orlando and Rosalind 
only for delightful burlesque. As Tou Like It is no true pas- 
toral; and no more readily than Jonson, could the free romantic 
spirit of Shakespeare be bound within the conventions of a 
form of literature so exotic and conventional. 

We reach now by process of elimination the slender pro- 
ducts of the true pastoral drama in England. They consist 
of scarcely more than a half-dozen English plays within the 
lifetime of Shakespeare, only two of them, Daniel's Queen s 
Arcadia and John Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, ranking 
really high as poetry. Indeed, if we except The Sad Shepherd 
of Jonson, we must look forward to the Amyntas of Randolph, 
a product of the revival of pastoral drama in the reign of King 
Charles, for a play to match these two in its kind. Of Samuel 
Daniel and his work as one of the earliest of the sonneteers, 
pastoralists, and writers of narrative poetry, we have heard 
above. It was in 1605 that The Queen's Arcadia was acted 
at Christ Church College, Oxford before Anne, the queen of 
King James. Daniel, as we know, had visited Italy; and, 
while there, had met Guarini, author of // Pastor Fido. This 
famous pastoral drama is Daniel's direct inspiration, and the 
English poet has preserved with a fidelity, complete but by 
no means slavish, the atmosphere and general milieu of the 



"THE QUEEN'S ARCADIA" 387 

pastoral. The story, which involves no very original intrigue, 
sets forth the usual pastoral figures, illustrating love in its 
various phases and relations. But Daniel introduces, not 
without success, a corrupt returned traveler and "a subtle 
wench of Corinth " who complicate the plot and offer a happy 
foil, alike to the superlative virtue and the excessive gravity 
of the pastoral folk. A fair specimen of Daniel's Arcadian 
style may be caught from the following lament: 

O Silvia, if thou needs wouldst have been gone. 

Thou shouldst have taken all away of thee; 

And nothing left to have remain'd with me. 

Thou shouldst have carried hence the portraiture 

Which thou hast left behind within my heart, 

Set in the table-frame of memory. 

That puts me still in mind of what thou wert, 

Whilst thou wert honest, and thy thoughts were pure; 

So that I might not thus in every place. 

Where I shall set my careful foot, confer 

With it of thee, and evermore be told. 

That here she walked, and lean'd upon mine arm; 

There gathered flowers, and brought them unto me; 

Here by the murmurs of this rustling spring, 

She sweetly lay, and in my bosom slept; 

Here first she showed me comforts when I pined; 

As if in every place her foot had stept, 

It had left Silvia in a print behind. 

As to the comedy of relief, it is in The Queen s 'Arcadia 
that the well-known descant upon tobacco occurs, a passage 
tuned to a nicety to the ear of the royal author of A Counter- 
blast to Tobacco. After telling of the source of this "herb 
wrapped up in rolls from the island of Nicosia" and describing 
how 

This in powder made, and fired, he sucks 
Out of a little hollow instrument 
Of calcinated clay, the smoke thereof: 
Which either he conveys out of his nose. 
Or down into his stomach with a whiff; 



388 THE PASTORAL DRAMA 

he continues of the Arcadians, that in place of their former 
pleasant festivals and meetings : 

Now do they nothing else but sit and suck, 

And spit and slaver all the time they sit, 

That I go by and laugh unto myself, 

That men of sense could ever be so mad 
To suck so gross a vapor that consumes 
Their spirits, spends nature, dries up memory, 
Corrupts the blood, and is a vanity. 

As yet there had been no attempt to popularize the true 
pastoral drama, although several comedies since the time of 
Lyly had disclosed pastoral elements, in addition to those 
already mentioned, especially John Day's Isle of Gulls and 
Humor out of Breath. The first is a sprightly little piece, 
founded on an episode of Sidney's Arcadia, but converting 
the heroic tone of the original into satire and raillery. Humor 
out of Breath, w^hile containing several charming scenes of a 
pastoral nature, is otherwise free from the conventions of the 
type. These comedies belong respectively to 1605 and a 
couple or more years after. It must have been about 1608 
that Fletcher staged his poetic pastoral drama, The Faithful 
Shepherdess. According to the author's own account the 
play was a failure on the popular boards; and in a preface 
*'To the Reader," when the drama came to print, Fletcher 
justifies his scheme and makes it plain that he accepted the 
pastoral conventions in their integrity. In the story the 
faithful shepherdess is Clorin who, her lover having died, has 
set up a bower near his grave wherein she lives the life of an 
anchoress and practises simple arts of healing. She is assisted 
in her work by a gentle satyr on whose original nature devotion 
to this pure mistress has wrought a miracle. . . . Clorin 
is sought in love by Thenot,. whom she gently but firmly 
refuses, and at last repulses completely by a momentary pre- 
tense of yielding; for it was Clorin's constancy, not Clorin, 
that Thenot adored. Amoret, unkindly wounded by her 
lover, Perigot, who, practised on, has thought her false, is 
brought by the satyr to Clorin for cure; and so, too, is Alexis, 



"THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS" 389 

justly wounded by a sullen shepherd on account of Cloe, 
a light-o'-love. All these and other shepherds and shepherd- 
esses are cured or reclaimed in the end by the holy anchoress, 
who continues faithful to her dead love. Into the allegory 
alleged by some to underlie this story it is unnecessary to 
inquire. The lapses from decorum which stain this otherwise 
beautiful poem are doubtless best explained by the method 
of contrast which Fletcher invoked in his earlier plays with 
Beaumont and carried at times to excess. In execution and 
within the limits of its artificial kind, The Faithful Shepherdess 
leaves little to criticism. It became, despite its first failure, 
exceedingly popular on the stage and was admired by gen- 
erations of poets. One need not turn far into its pages to 
find how much even Milton owed to it. The octosyllables 
given to the gentle-natured satyr are always particularly 
musical. Thus he offers his forest treasures to Clorin his 
benefactress: 

Here be grapes, whose lusty blood 

Is the learned poet's good. 

Sweeter yet did never crown 

The head of Bacchus; nuts more brown 

Than the squirrel's teeth that crack them; 

Deign, O fairest fair, to take them! 

For these black-eyed Dryope 

Hath oftentimes commanded me 

With mv clasped knee to climb: 

See how well the lusty time 

Hath decked their rising cheeks in red, 

Such as on your lips is spread! 

Here be berries for a queen, 

Some be red, some be green; 

These are of that luscious meat. 

The great god Pan himself doth eat: 

All these, and what the woods can yield, 

The hanging mountain or the field, 

I freely offer, and ere long 

Will bring you more, more sweet and strong. 

In The Winter s Tale will be found some of the most 
exquisite outdoor scenes in our drama. But they are pastoral 



390 THE PASTORAL DRAMA 

only in the sense that they deal with shepherds and their life. 
Greene's prose tale of Pandosto, the source, is more pastoral 
than these scenes, and the atmosphere of the rest of the play 
is that of the court. The same thing is true of the rare comedy 
of Robert Daborne called The Poor Mans Comfort, 1613. 
This pretty romantic play, which has been almost completely 
forgotten, departs from one of the long accepted conventions 
of romance to leave the heroine a shepherdess, and no princess, 
even in the end. In 16 14 Daniel returned to the pastoral 
drama with Hymen's Triumph, a shorter, maturer work 
though scarcely equaling the more elaborately planned Queen s 
Arcadia. Hymen s Triumph was acted before their majesties 
on the occasion of a noble wedding. The demands of such 
an event gave to Daniel's play much the sumptuousness in 
performance of the masque. It is written throughout in that 
admirable English diction that earned for the author in his 
own day the sobriquet "well-languaged Daniel." The con- 
tinued touch of the pastoral with the universities is shown in 
a strange, but interesting and far from unpoetical, production 
called Sicelides, the work of Phineas Fletcher, author of The 
Purple Island, and intended for performance before the king 
at Cambridge in 16 15. Sicelides is a piscatory comedy in 
which fisher-folk take the place of the shepherds of the pastoral. 
This was quite orthodox, at least on the example of the pis- 
catory eclogue, a variety of the pastoral neither unknown to 
Sannazaro nor to Theocritus himself. The pastoral drama 
seems to have fallen into disfavor about this time. At least 
there are few, even inferior, specimens until the revival of the 
mode, some ten years later, in the reign of King Charles. 
Jonson's admirable fragment of a pastoral play has already 
been mentioned. The Sad Shepherd was never finished and 
never staged. In it, as in so many of his works, Jonson ap- 
pears to have come into direct rivalry with Daniel, who was 
again and again the butt of Jonson's ridicule. It seems not 
unreasonable to believe The Sad Shepherd a production of 
about this period and that it was written to emulate the suc- 
cess of Hymen's Triumph rather than long before or (what 
is still more improbable) after all his immediate competitors 



THE MASQUE DEFINED 391 

for the favor of the court had ceased to write dramas of this 
kind. 

Masking in the sense of revelry, taking more or less a 
dramatic form, is as old in England as the drama itself. The 
masque, as a specific variety of entertainment at court or 
among the nobility, was a development of the latest years of 
Elizabeth's reign and the time of James. Moreover, had it 
not been for the peculiar talents of Ben Jonson and the con- 
junction with him of Inigo Jones, the royal architect and 
ingenious designer of scenery and stage devices, the history 
of the English masque would have been far shorter and poorer. 
In the restrictive sense of the word with which we are alone 
concerned, a masque may be defined as a setting, lyric, scenic, 
and dramatic, for a court ball. It is an entertainment into 
which songs, dialogue, action, music, scenery, and costume all 
enter; but the nucleus is always a dance. The precise lan- 
guage of the day, for example, recognized in the "entertain- 
ment" a similar amplification of the speech of welcome, and 
in the word "barriers," a mock tournament, embellished 
with dialogue and action. Moreover, an examination of the 
works of the age will disclose an accurate use of these terms. 
In the masque, from the first, a distinction was drawn between 
"the masquers," as they were called, and the professional 
assistants in music, dancing, and acting. The masquers ranged 
from eight to sixteen, and were the titled people of the court. 
They were handsomely attired and grouped in positions 
heightened by scenic arrangement and mechanical contri- 
vance; but little save the creation of an imposing show was 
expected of them. As the masque developed, it was soon 
found necessary to enlist the services of professional actors 
and singers for the presentation of the more premeditated 
parts. But care was taken not to bring these people into 
touch with the masquers. As to the parts of the masque, 
there was first the appearance of the masquers, with their 
march or descent from their "sieges" or seata of state in the 
scene, and their first dance: all this was called the "entry"; 
then there was the "main" or principal dance. All up to 
this was planned and premeditated. Then followed two 



392 THE JACOBEAN MASQUE 

extemporal parts," the dance with the ladies" and the "revels," 
the latter made up of galliards, lavoltas, and corantos. Lastly, 
there was the closing march or "going out. " That the masque 
is a purely exotic by-form of the drama, derived mainly either 
from Italy or from France, can hardly be held in view of the 
long preparation for it in the annals of the festivities at the 
English court; but that foreign influences affected its nature 
and the course of its development in England is not to be 
denied. 

The earliest examples of a masque fulfilling the technical 
conditions, mentioned above, are to be found in the account 
of the festivities known as the Gesta Grayorum, "betwixt All- 
Hollantide and Christmas," 1594. This is the most elaborate 
"Christmassing" recorded, and its solemnities included a 
complete royal mock court with all the ceremonials thereof: 
feastings, dancing, dramas, masques, and what not. Of the 
three masques of the Gesta Grayorum, the Masque of Proteus 
presages nearly all the elements subsequently to be so highly 
developed in the next reign. This production was the work 
of two well-known young men, Francis Davison, editor a few 
years later of the last of the lyrical anthologies, The Poetical 
Rhapsody, and Thomas Campion, the musician and lyrist. 
This masque is important only for its historical position. 
It involved an obvious enough compliment to the queen, who 
is likened to "the adamantine rock" that draws all hearts. 

With the accession of Elizabeth's successor, a new impetus 
was given to masquing and entertainments of every kind. 
The king's progress up to London and through the metropolis 
to his court was one continued scene of welcome in which the 
"entertainment" in its technical sense was resorted to again 
and again. The chief rival poets, on the way, were Jonson 
and Daniel; and the latter in his Vision of the Twelve God- 
desses, acted in January, 1604, presented the first of the noble 
series of court masques which grace the annals of King James. 
Daniel's masque is everything that a masque should be except 
dramatic. That want Jonson supplied in his Masque of 
Blackness a year later, adding a wealth and richness of poetic 
imagination and ingenuity of detail that placed him, at once 



EARLIER MASQUES OF JONSON 393 

without a rival, the accepted entertainer of the court. This 
is not the place in which to list Ben Jonson's masques. His 
activity in this respect continued for thirty years during which 
he put forth nine entertainments, three barriers, two anti- 
masques and no less than two-and-twenty masques proper, 
some of them of extraordinary completeness. Jonson wrote 
more than three times as many masques as all his competitors 
— Campion, Daniel, Beaumont, Chapman, Marston, and 
Browne — together; and their quality in general may com- 
pare to advantage with the best. In Hymenal, wherein Jon- 
son used his notion of the humors and affections issuing from 
the microcosm or globe figuring a man, in the admirably 
startling contrasts of the fine Masque of Queens, in The 
Golden Age in which Pallas turns the Iron Age and all his 
attendant evils into statues, and in Pleasure Reconciled to 
Virtue (wherein the character Comus may have been sug- 
gested to Milton), we have examples of the poetic beauty, 
dramatic aptitude, inventive ingenuity, and resourcefulness 
that make Jonson the great master of the masque. 

All of these masques were sumptuously "furnished" and 
ingeniously staged by the skill of Inigo Jones. In Hymenoei 
gigantic golden figures of Atlas and Hercules were the support- 
ers of the scene; in the Viscount Haddington's Masque, 1608, 
golden pilasters, "charged with spoils and trophies, . . .all 
wrought round and bold" supported "overhead two personages. 
Triumph and Victory, in flying postures and twice as large as 
the life, in place of the arch, and holding a garland of myrtle 
for a key. " This framing of the scene, utterly in contrast with 
the practice of the popular stage, was frequent thereafter. 
In The Masque of Queens, "an ugly hell . . . flaming 
beneath, smoked unto the top of the roof, " and afforded the 
setting for the antimasque of witches. Novelty and surprise 
was carefully preconcerted for the moment of the appearance 
of the masquers, who were attired with a variety and splendor 
of costume that readily explains the extravagant cost of these 
spectacles. At times the masquers were "discovered" sitting 
in a glittering temple, or seated in "a great concave shell"; 
at others they descended from the clouds, or emerged from 



394 THE JACOBEAN MASQUE 

"a microcosm or globe." This last is described as "filled 
with countries and those gilded; where the sea was expressed, 
heightened with silver waves. This stood, or rather hung 
(for no axle was seen to support it), and turning softly dis- 
covered the first masque." Landscapes and especially the 
sea were again and again represented, the waves in motion, 
with Tritons and sea-horses "bigger than life" among them, 
and even ships, sailing to and fro. Careful effects were those 
of light and clouds "made artificially to swell and ride like 
the rack," and the moon in a "heaven, vaulted with blue silk 
and set with stars of silver which had in them several lights. " 
Even the modern Wagnerian device of the rise of steam to 
obscure a part of the scene was not unknown to these ingenious 
performances; and there it was further refined, after a classical 
precedent, into "a mist of delicate perfumes. " 

Not the least service that Jonson rendered to the masque 
was the development of its dramatic capabilities in the element 
of relief. This was called the antimasque and was always 
entrusted to professional hands. Thus, in The Masque of 
Queens, the antimasque is a bevy of witches grotesquely con- 
trasted with the beautiful queens that follow. Mercury Vin- 
dicated from the Alchemists opens with a vivacious scene in 
which that volatile deity escapes from the furnace of Vulcan 
and "imperfect creatures with helms and limbecks on their 
heads" figure in the dances; and in Love Restored the scene 
opens with a satiric little sketch of the difficulties that a plain 
man experiences in gaining access to these spectacles. In 
two of Jonson's works of this kind the antimasque has usurped 
the whole scene and the masque proper fallen out of existence 
For example, The \Anti\masque of Christmas introduces that 
personage of good cheer with his sons and daughters, Carol, 
Wassel, and Minced-pie; and the later Gipsies Metamorphosed 
is a humorous if vulgar rendering of a bit of actual low life, 
appreciated by the king to Jonson's enrichment for the same 
reason that his majesty so hugely enjoyed Ignoramus. 

Jonson's activity in the masque carries us well over into 
the time of Charles. But there were other notable masques 
of the days of King James as well as Jonson's. In 1610 



THE GRAND MASQUES OF 1613 395 

Daniel furnished Tethys' Festival for which Inigo Jones de- 
vised no less than three changes of scenery. Novel features 
of this masque were Daniel's attempt to restrict the performers 
in it to "great personages," and its extraordinary cost, reck- 
oned at ;^i6oo, more than double Jonson's previous masque 
of that year. Love Free'd from Ignorance. In 1613 three 
masques of unprecedented grandeur were furnished by nobles 
and by gentlemen of the Inns of Court to grace the marriage 
of the Princess Elizabeth to the Palsgrave. The first of these 
was The Lords' Masque by Campion. The scene changed 
four times and the masquers were stars and golden statues 
called to life. Chapman's masque, which followed the next 
day, was presented by the gentlemen of the Middle Temple 
and Lincoln's Inn and exhibited the novel departure of a 
-sumptuous procession to the masquing place by land, in which 
appeared cars triumphal and a cavalcade attended by two 
hundred halberdiers, all gorgeously attired. Chapman's work 
is over-elaborate and its effect could not have been otherwise 
than tedious. The third grand masque for this wedding was 
that of Beaumont, presented by the gentlemen of the Inner 
Temple and Gray's Inn. This was to have been preceded by 
a water pageant, planned to move up the Thames from Win- 
chester House in a gallant flotilla with music, torches, and the 
booming of ordnance. But this plan was only partially car- 
ried out, as even the Jacobean powers of endurance in pleasure 
gave out on this third consecutive day of masquing and feasting. 
Beaumont's masque was performed, however, a few days 
later, and with the success which its poetic merit deserved. 
It is of interest to recall that Beaumont offered this masque 
in his capacity of a member of the Inner Temple, not as a 
notable writer for the popular stage (a thing that he was con- 
tent to conceal); and secondly that Sir Francis Bacon, then 
solicitor-general, was chiefly responsible for the expenses of 
its furnishing. Another masque on which, as we have seen. 
Bacon is said to have expended ;^2000 was the Masque of 
Flowers, 16 14, the work of three gentlemen of Gray's Inn. 
Among Jacobean masques, those of Campion are conspicuous 
for the care which the author bestowed on the music both 



396 THE JACOBEAN MASQUE 

vocal and instrumental. A masque of poetical quality and 
— for the masque — of singular coherency of plot is that 
of William Browne, entitled Ulysses and the Sirens, 1615. 
The masque continued to rise in expense and sumptuousness 
until it became in the next reign an impoverishment to the 
royal purse and a scandal to the serious minded. 

As to the nature of the Jacobean masque, its oldest inher- 
itance was allegory, which it derived directly from the morality 
and the allegorical devices, long in vogue in previous courts. 
But the allegory of the morality was ingenious and didactic; 
that of the masque was artistic and eulogistic, and by the 
necessities of the case modeled on simpler lines. To the 
cultivated people of the court, suggestion was commonly 
sufficient, and as Jonson well put it, "a writer should trust 
somewhat to the capacity of the spectators, especially in these 
spectacles; where men, besides inquiring eyes, are understood 
to bring quick ears, and not those sluggish ones of porters and 
mechanics, that must be bored through with narratives. " 
The Jacobean masque abounds, as might be expected, in 
classical and mythological personages, imagery, and allusion. 
This was no affectation in an age in which education came to 
men, and women too, chiefly by means of the classics. Jon- 
son's ancient lore stood him in good stead in his masques; but 
he by no means escaped the pedantry of classical reference 
and learned quotation, a weakness which Daniel and others 
were quick to see and caustically report. Neither coherency 
nor anything like unity of design can be said ever to have 
distinguished the masque, and even satire — except for cer- 
tain personal lampoons in the antimasquing parts of Jonson's 
work — was kept decorously in leash in the royal presence. 
In a consideration of the masque it must be remembered that 
this was only the most highly elaborated of a large variety of 
like entertainments that signalized almost every important 
social function of the day. Speeches of welcome and fare- 
well; pageants, interludes, and processions; Maying, Christ- 
massing, and wassailing; sham tournaments, mock courts 
with all their ceremonials — such were the incessant pleasures 



THE MASQUE AND THE POPULAR STAGE 397 

of the day. For example, the lord mayor was installed with 
elaborate pageantry year after year. More than thirty of 
these productions between the years 1580 and 1629 remain 
extant to disclose the character of this civic pageantry, and 
some of the "shows" are by the hands of the best poets of 
their time, Peele, Munday, Dekker, Middleton, Marston, and 
Shirley. Even Jonson's activity was not wholly absorbed 
by the court. 

That the popular stage should reflect this fashion of the 
day was in the very nature of things. Nearly all the drama- 
tists who wrote in the reign of James employ the elements of 
the masque more or less organically in plays. To mention 
only Shakespeare, there is an antic-dance of satyrs in The 
Winter s Tale and a betrothal masque in The Tempest, in- 
volving an antimasque of "strange shapes"; while into Cym- 
heline has been thrust a "dream" with Jupiter descending 
"on an eagle, " a paltry stage device which only a contemporary 
demand for such stuff could justify or excuse. A more impor- 
tant matter is the more general effect which the extravagant 
and ingenious settings of masques at court must have had on 
the plays of the London theaters. It seems impossible to 
believe, as some have believed, that the popular stage was 
little affected by the devices of Inigo Jones. That an alert 
and captious audience such as that of Shakespeare, in his 
later days, should have remained content with bare boards, 
when the court plays were set handsomely in perspective and 
with change of scene, is altogether defiant of the probabilities. 
There must certainly have been under the influences of such 
examples a gradual improvement alike in the staging and the 
costuming of popular dramas, although the precise degree 
of this change must remain a matter indeterminable. And 
yet the college plays, the pastoral drama, and the masque 
remain exotic and, at least during the lifetime of Shakespeare, 
without the direct current of drama that flowed from Marlowe 
to Shirley; the first because of the collegian's uninformed and 
conscious attitude of superiority towards the popular drama, 
together with the tradition that perpetuated the following of 



398 THE JACOBEAN MASQUE 

ancient models or their Italian imitationsj the pastoral, because 
its conventional ideals mark the antithesis of the English con- 
ception of free country life; and lastly the masque, for its 
restriction to the entertainment of royalty and because, in its 
thoughtless pursuit after novelty and its wanton expense and 
display, the drama evaporated out of it. 



CHAPTER XXI 

SHAKESPEARE AND THE NEW DRAMA OF 
FLETCHER 

IN any history of the literature or poetry of the times of 
Elizabeth and James, the drama must bulk large, not 
only because of Shakespeare, jonson, and the rest, but because 
in no other literary form of that age was expression so untram- 
meled and life capable of representation, both so faithfully 
and so ideally. In the previous pages we have endeavored 
to represent this drama in its sudden rise from the immaturities 
of the first plays in regular dramatic form to the height of 
comedy in Dekker, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and the sum- 
mation of tragedy in Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Webster. 
We have been more concerned with the variety of Elizabethan 
drama in its range — from the dainty cleverness of Lyly or 
the poetic fancy of Dekker to the imaginative fulness of 
Shakespearean comedy, from the actualism of Arden or the 
melodrama of Kyd to the passionate idealism of Juliet or the 
mastery of terror which Lear or The Duchess of Malfi depict 
— than we have been concerned with individual authors in 
the integrity of their careers. The group of dramatists 
popularly known as Shakespeare's predecessors fell early 
out of the race. Dekker, Chapman, Jonson and Middleton, 
who began writing in the middle nineties, all continued to 
write after Shakespeare's death, although the distinctive work 
of every one of them falls strictly within his lifetime. Mars- 
ton, Webster, and Tourneur condensed their shorter dramatic 
careers into a period almost coincident with the last ten years 
of Shakespeare's life. So that of the great Elizabethans in 
the drama that remain — Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, 
Ford, and Shirley — only the last three are strictly post- 
Shakespearean. Beaumont was always an amateur, and he 
gave up writing for the stage early. The triumphs that gave 
to Fletcher the succession to Shakespeare's primacy were made 

399 



400 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

before the latter's death. In the present chapter our concern 
is with the relations and characteristics of Beaumont and 
Fletcher as dramatists, with the Fletcherian dramatic departure 
called tragicomedy and its bearings on the group of Shake- 
speare's plays known as "dramatic romances." It was 
tragicomedy, in the hands of Fletcher, that developed a new 
variety of the romantic drama which was potently to affect 
what came after; for it is in his plays that we meet, almost for 
the first time, the exaggerated romanticism that led through 
successive steps in the next reign to the heroic play of Dave- 
nant and Dryden. 

While it is obvious that no actual combination of tragic 
and comic elements could justify so contradictory a term as 
tragicomedy, the word was employed by writers of the time of 
James to denote a romantic drama involving serious passion, 
yet ending happily: and such plays speedily acquired an 
extraordinary popularity. Tragicomedy is not necessarily 
melodrama, but it easily degenerates into such. Its dangers 
are false sentiment and perverted ethics; and it is liable to 
sacrifice the logic of events to dramatic surprise. The truest 
tragicomedy is that in which the circumstances of the drama 
and its clash of personalities are such that the outcome is 
naturally uncertain. The Merchant of Venice trembles in 
the balance between tragedy and comedy in the supreme scene 
of the trial, and only Shylock's final hesitancy to accept, with 
his own destruction, a full and final revenge preserves the 
drama within the latter category. 

Of John Fletcher we have already heard in this book as 
a writer of comedies in the manner of Middleton and as the 
author of a poetical pastoral drama, The Faithful Shepherdess. 
Fletcher was born in 1579, the son of Richard Fletcher, Dean 
of Peterborough and later Bishop of London. The bishop's 
brother was Giles Fletcher, author of the sonnet-sequence, 
Licia, and both his sons, Giles the Younger and Phineas 
Fletcher have found their place in the pages above as followers 
of the Spenserian allegorized pastoral. John Fletcher, the 
dramatist, thus came of a notable and literary family. He 
attended Bene't College, Cambridge, as a pensioner in 1591; 



FLETCHER AND BEAUMONT 401 

and, as a younger son, received no patrimony except a part 
of his father's library. Much praised and esteemed by his 
contemporaries and frequently mentioned for his poetry, we 
know surprisingly little what manner of man Fletcher was, 
and his relations to his fellows, Shakespeare, Beaumont, 
Massinger, and the rest, are vague and derivable for the most 
part by inference. The custom of Fletcher's age habitually 
associated his name with that of Francis Beaumont, a man 
five years his junior, of much the same station in life, but of 
whom we know rather more. Beaumont was likewise a 
younger brother. His father was Sir Francis Beaumont of 
Grace Dieu in Lancashire, a justice of the Common Pleas. 
Young Beaumont received his education at Broadgate's Hall, 
Oxford, where he was admitted a gentleman commoner in 
1597, and at the Inner Temple, for which society we have 
already found him writing a masque under the patronage of 
Sir Francis Bacon. We do not know when Beaumont and 
Fletcher became intimate; not unlikely it was through the 
acquaintance of each with Ben Jonson, who drew to himself 
alike from his convivial habits, his geniality, and his learning 
and poetry, the Bohemian spirits of his day, and held them 
in allegiance at the Mermaid and later in the famous Apollo 
room of the Devil Tavern. We are certain that there was 
personal friendship and collaboration between Fletcher and 
Beaumont; and we are equally sure that the publication, in 
the folio of 1647, of the collected plays of the former vi?^ith 
those in which the latter had shared, has had the effect of 
giving greater weight to this association than is at all warranted 
by the facts. In this very volume we may feel sure that there 
are more than twice as many plays in which Fletcher's col- 
laborator or reviser was Philip Massinger. And when it is 
recalled that Beaumont died a young man in 16 16, just a 
month before Shakespeare, while Fletcher continued an 
active dramatist up to his death by the plague nearly ten years 
later, enough has been said to make patent that the expression, 
"the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher," applied to any large 
body of dramas in which the latter had a hand, is a pure mis- 
nomer. 



402 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

The most conspicuous difference between these two authors 
consists in the fact that Fletcher was a professional dramatist; 
Beaumont was not. Beaumont does not appear to have 
sanctioned the publication of any of his works, his name ap- 
pearing during his lifetime only on the title of his Masque of 
the Inner Temple and Grays Inn. It seems not improbable 
that the two young men began authorship independently, 
Fletcher in that direct picturing of London life that we asso- 
ciate with the name of Middleton; Beaumont in a closer fol- 
lowing of Jonson's comedy of humors to which he added a 
quality of burlesque all his own. Beaumont, it has been 
surmised, first wrote for the Children of Paul's from about 
1604 to 1606 or 1607, Fletcher's earliest unaided work being 
for the Children of his Majesty's Revels. In 1610 both authors 
were writing for the King's company, having brought with 
them work previously written together. Tradition relates 
that Beaumont's part in this collaboratioa was advisory and 
critical; and even Ben Jonson, his senior by ten years, addressed 
him enthusiastically in an epigram beginning: "How I do 
love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse," and elsewhere with a 
deference surprising in a man of Jonson's temper. However, 
it is not to be questioned that Beaumont did more than advise 
and criticize in some of the dramas attributed to him and 
Fletcher in their immortal partnership. Indeed, without the 
charmed Shakespearean circle, there is no question of criticism 
relating to Elizabethan drama that has been so much argued 
and exploited. Into its niceties the purposes of this book can 
not demand that we enter. But this much must be said, for 
Beaumont falls entirely within our period, however the Flet- 
cherian plays at large may extend beyond it. A consideration 
of work which we have reason to believe only Beaumont's 
discloses — according to the critics — that he was the truer 
Elizabethan, that is, his was the higher artistic earnestness. 
A genius for tragedy, a deeper insight into character, especially 
in the realization of the nature of his women, a power of pathos, 
a breadth of humor and good-natured satire — all these things 
are posited of the younger dramatist. While in contrast, 
Fletcher is accused of a want of artistic seriousness, allowed 



FLETCHER AND BEAUMONT 403 

to possess "a pretty, playful fancy," abundant wit but a 
lighter quality of humor, and a more superficial insight into 
human nature and conduct. Fletcher's genius is clever, 
ready, and off-hand, but often careless and morally irrespon- 
sible : and the styles of the two men bear out this contrast. 
Beaumont, after the custom of the older dramatists, employs 
prose and rime at times to vary his blank-verse, the phrasing 
of which exhibits a moderate freedom not unlike the self- 
contained and more carefully wrought verse of Jonson. Beau- 
mont is, moreover, as careful as Jonson himself as to the 
numbering of his syllables, seldom admitting a redundancy to 
alter the strict decasyllabic character of his lines. 

Presumptuous Iris, I could make thee dance, 
Till thou forgott'st thy lady's messages. 
And ran'st back crying to her. Thou shalt know 
My power is more; only my breath and this 
Shall move fix'd stars, and force the firmament 
To yield the Hyades, who govern showers 
And dewy clouds, in whose dispersed drops 
Thou form'st the shape of thy deceitful bow. 

In contrast with these lines from Beaumont's Masque, we 
may take these opening words of Bonduca, as unquestionably 
Fletcher's in his confirmed later manner: 

The hardy Romans! oh, ye gods of Britain! 

The rust of arms, the blushing shame of soldiers! 

Are these the men that conquer by inheritance ? 

The fortune-makers ? these the Julians, 

That with the sun measure the end of nature, 

Making the world but one Rome and one Czesar ? 

Shame, how they flee! Caesar's soft soul dwell's in 'em, 

Their mothers got 'em sleeping, Pleasure nursed 'em; 

Their bodies sweat with sweet oils, love's allurements, 

Not lusty arms. 

Here all is in contrast. The style is easy and rapid; the con- 
struction loose, cumulative, and at times rambling; the verse 
distinguished by an incessant use of redundant syllables, 
commonly at the end of each line, transmuting the usual 
measure of ten syllables to one habitually of eleven with a 



404 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

pause at the end of each line. To speak technically, the 
hendecasyllabic verse end-stopped is characteristic of Fletcher 
as it is characteristic of no other poet within the range of 
English letters; and out of this departure in dramatic verse, 
Fletcher made not only a novel, but a remarkably success- 
full and adaptable medium for the conveyance of dramatic 
dialogue. 

With these criteria of contrast, scholars have portioned 
out the parts of those plays which, from their dates or for 
other reasons, may be supposed to be the work of both Beau- 
mont and Fletcher, with a further corrective, referable to a 
later revision in some cases by Massinger. The last-named 
dramatist does not concern us, as his work falls beyond our 
period. In general it may be said that these tests of author- 
ship are satisfactory; but it is easy to exaggerate their impor- 
tance and to forget that after all joint authorship, in a product 
like a play, means the presence of both authors throughout, 
or we can expect no such unity as even these Elizabethan 
productions often present. The present writer professes a 
profound distrust of the glib assignments of scenes, passages, 
and lines to given authors and given periods of their activity; 
and he believes that, in the Beaumont-Fletcher-Massinger 
group of plays, Beaumont has been assigned, in general, 
rather too large a part, and Massinger much too subtly traced. 

With King James a few years on his throne, the taste of 
the time had undergone certain changes and modifications. 
While we can hardly say that men had surfeited of tragedy, 
at least they had become less fond of that strong wine, or 
rather, of the wholesome drug in shape of a moral application 
which it frequently involved; and they preferred to go home 
pleased rather than thoughtful. Again, the new performances 
at court, called masques, suddenly developed, as we have seen, 
into extraordinary cost and splendor, and the popular stage 
was immediately affected. The craving, too, and demand for 
novelty strained the drama in every direction to make the 
realistic more actual and coarse, the romantic more extrav- 
agant and unnatural; to deepen the motives of passion and 
crime, if such were possible, and lighten comedy into greater 



PHILASTER" 



405 



frivolity, farce, and fantasticality. At this juncture came 
Fletcher, one of the cleverest playwrights in the range of 
letters, to combine the courage of the innovator with a ready 
aptitude for seizing the occasion. The result was the invention 
of a new kind of romantic drama, founded on contrast and 
heightened situation, which proceeded with great rapidity of 
action and was carried on, to a certain degree, by means of 
personages more or less presented in types. This novel 
drama he served in the new, lithe, and supple variety of blank- 
verse described above, so colloquial that it did away with the 
necessity of interlarded prose and yet retained the power to 
become eminently poetical at need. 

The typical play of this new class is Philaster, referred to 
in an epigram of Davies of Hereford in 16 10, and the work 
of both Beaumont and Fletcher. Philaster abounds in con- 
trasts. There is first the usurping king and the true prince 
Philaster, in his role as the true lover and as a noble gentleman, 
also set off against the ignoble voluptuary, Prince Pharamond. 
Both are suitors to the peerless princess, Arethusa, whose 
steadfastness and pure love is thrown into relief as compared 
with the wanton conduct of her waiting-woman, Megra; and 
whose love, requited by Philaster, is once more contrasted 
with the pathetic, unrequited devotion of the page, Bellario^ 
who serves Philaster and aids him in his courtship of Arethusa,. 
though actually a maiden devotedly in love with him. We 
have here a drama of sentimental interest thrust into the 
midst of elements heroically tragic. The action is swift, 
full of event and of varied emotion; and the personages are 
governed by prearranged ruling qualities from first to last. 
Types are the result. Philaster gave to the drama the heroic 
but unreasoning hero; the blunt, out-spoken soldier; the dis- 
consolate and love-lorn maiden; and the semi-comic poltroon. 
None the less Philaster is in many respects an admirable 
drama and deserving of the popularity that it long enjoyed. 
Its novelty must have been startling in its time; and while the 
heroic conception of some of its characters, especially the 
prince, has given him an irrational inconsistency and sapped 
somewhat the moral basis of his conduct, the poetry of the 



4o6 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

play, its sentiment and pathos, are worthy of all the praise 
that they customarily receive. The source of Philaster has 
not been discovered by the indefatigable seekers in the quar- 
ries of literature, and although a more or less direct influence 
of the Spanish comedias de capa y espada has been surmised, 
the ingenious plotting of Philaster is doubtless the invention 
of the authors. 

The likelihood of this origin is strengthened when we find 
almost the same range of material employed again and again 
with ingenious variety to repeat the same effective result. 
The Maid's Tragedy, Cupid's Revenge, and A King and No 
King, all first staged between 1609 and 161 1, are plays closely 
resembling Philaster in plot, construction, style and char- 
acterization; and further examples of this likeness are not far 
to seek within the range of the Beaumont-Fletcher-Massinger 
plays. On the other hand these general likenesses are readily 
exaggerated. The Maid's Tragedy is a powerful drama in 
which the heroic but unreasoning hero becomes the bewildered 
and unstable Amintor; and the evil and spiteful trull, Megra 
(in Philaster), is replaced by the tragic figure of Evadne, 
w^rought to evil by ambition atoned in death. In A King and 
No King, correspondingly, the heroic Philaster is replaced 
by the pseudo-king, Arbaces, intentionally represented as a 
boaster and ignoble, while Spaconia, who corresponds to the 
love-lorn maidens, Euphrasia and Aspasia of the other two 
plays, is a young woman of resources and contrives in the end 
to keep her prince for herself 

An ingenious theory, which has recently obtained much 
currency through the sanction of recognized authority,^ ex- 
tends the criteria of this group of Beaumont and Fletcher to 
the later work of Shakespeare. This theory holds, in a word, 
that Shakespeare was seriously affected, in these latest ro- 
mances, by the new Fletcherian tragicomedy, and that this 
influence worked to the detriment of Shakespeare's art, de- 
stroying especially the strong lines of his characterization and 

^ See especially A. H. Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and 
Fletcher on Shakespeare, 1901, and his excellent edition of The 
Maid's Tragedy and Philaster, 1906. 



THE "ROMANCES" OF SHAKESPEARE 407 

reducing his art to the measure of the man he imitated. This 
theory would make Imogen, Hermione, Perdita, and Miranda 
women less vital than their elder sisters of tragedy or comedy, 
and regard them as the kindred of the heroines of Fletcher. 
Now if the list of Shakespeare's plays be examined, we shall 
find besides the clearly defined group of comedies, histories, 
and tragedies, several about which there may well arise a 
doubt as to whether they belong to any of these accepted 
categories. Troilus and Cressida, which we have already 
considered, is a problematic drama, too serious and bitter 
for comedy yet rising neither to the height of tragic passion 
nor disposing of its dramatis personae in death to expiate 
crime. So, too, Timon of Athens, though it concludes with 
the death of the hero, is rather a biographical narrative dram- 
atized than a tragedy as that term is ordinarily employed. 
Timon is a story of the ancient world; and perhaps as classically 
set forth as we could expect of the master of romantic art, 
with Painter's Palace of Pleasure as an immediate model. 
But Troilus is redolent of medieval romance; and so too is 
Pericles, doubtless on the stage by 1608. In short, to the 
three dramas, Cymhehne, The Winter s Tale, and The Tempest, 
usually included in this group called "dramatic romances," 
we may add Troilus, Timon, and Pericles before, and perhaps 
The Two Noble Kinsmen, if Shakespeare had a hand in it, 
after. Common characteristics of these plays are considerable 
looseness in construction, recalling the epic qualities of the 
old chronicle plays; far less strenuous passion than that of the 
tragedies; and though there is comedy in them all, merriment 
is far from their dominant tone. Once more, these dramas 
delight in strange lands or wanderings over unknown seas, 
in shipwreck and other adventure, in children and kindred 
lost or estranged, found and reconciled. Moreover, these 
dramas at times trespass imaginatively, as in The Tempest, 
on the supernatural. , It may be noted in passing that these 
are elements altogether distinguishable from the courtly 
atmosphere of intrigue and the incessant dramatic contrast 
of the Philaster group. 

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, was first published in 1609 and 



4o8 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

went through five quartos before it was collected into the third 
folio of Shakespeare's works in 1664. The story of Apol- 
lonius of Tyre, of which Pericles is a dramatized version, is 
one of the most generally diffused in fiction; and the immediate 
sources of the drama appear to have been the tale as told by 
Gower in his Confessio Jmajjtis, and the prose version of 
Lawrence Twine in his Pattern of Painful Adventures, IS7^- 
The circumstance that Pericles was not included in the first 
folio, that the workmanship is exceedingly unequal, and the 
text corrupt has caused doubt to be cast on Shakespeare's 
sharing in it; and WiUiam Rowley and George Wilkins, a 
minor dramatist who published a novel on the subject about 
the date of the play, have been named as Shakespeare's pos- 
sible collaborators. There are scenes unmistakably Shake- 
speare's, however, in Pericles, no matter what inferior hand 
may have supphed the wooden choruses spoken by Gower, 
and several unworthy scenes. As to Shakespearean quality, 
few scenes are lovelier than that in which the distracted Peri- 
cles, sunk in melancholy, is restored to his faculties by the 
sweet singing of his own lost daughter. 

Pericles. I am great with woe, and shall deliver weeping. 
My dearest wife was like this maid, and such a one 
My daughter might have been. My queen's square brows; 
Her stature to an inch; as wand-like straight; 
As silver-voic'd; her eyes as jewel-like 
And cas'd as richly; in pace another Juno; 
Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry, 
The more she gives them speech. Where do you live ? 

Marina. Where I am but a stranger. From the deck 
You may discern the place. 

Per. Where were you bred ? 
And how achiev'd you these endowments, which 
You make more rich to owe .'' 

Mar. If I should tell my history, it would seem 
Like lies disdain'd in the reporting. 

Per. Prithee, speak. 
Falseness cannot come from thee; for thou look'st 
Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace 
For the crown'd Truth to dwell in. I will believe thee, 



"PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE" 409 

And make my senses credit thy relation 
To points that seem impossible; for thou look'st 
Like one I lov'd indeed. What were thy friends ? 
Didst thou not say, when I did push thee back — 
Which was when I perceiv'd thee — that thou cam'st 
From good descending ? 
Mar. So indeed I did. 

And so the beautiful lines run on to the joy of certainty: 
Per. O Helicanus, strike me, honored sir; 
Give me a gash, put me to present pain; 
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me 
O'erbear the shores of my mortality, 
And drown me with their sweetness. O, come hither, 
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget; 
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus, 
And found at sea again! O Helicanus, 
Down on thy knees, thank the holy gods as loud 
As thunder threatens us. This is Marina. 

Now, blessing on thee! Rise, thou art my child. 
Give me fresh garments. Mine own, Helicanus; 
She is not dead at Tarsus, as she should have been, 
By savage Cleon. She shall tell thee all; 
When thou shalt kneel, and justify in knowledge 
She is thy very princess. 

All this and much more of Pericles we may feel assured is the 
very Shakespeare. 

Pericles may be said to unite the "romance" vs^ith the tale 
of adventure as Timon touches classical story. So Cymheline 
combines the apparently discordant elements of legendary 
chronicle history with the "romance." Cymheline was first 
printed in the folio and may be dated about 1609. The 
legendary history of King Cymheline, Shakespeare derived 
from his habitual source, Holinshed's Chronicles, the romantic 
story from some version (French, Italian, or English) of a 
tale of the Decameron of Boccaccio. In fact, all the features 
of the wager of Posthumous, the repulse of lachimo, the false 
tokens, the attempted punishment and wandering of Imogen 
are to be found in a tale of exceedingly wide diffusion, a point 



410 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

to be remembered when "the indefensible conduct of Post- 
humous" is dilated on by the psychologic critic. To the 
present author Cymheline is one of the most beautiful of the 
Shakespearean plays. He does not look for a closely-knit 
and intricately-woven plot in a drama of this kind, and can 
enjoy, without strictures, a story that straggles from Britain 
to Rome and back again and unites a romantic tale of the 
Renaissance with a hotchpotch of legendary battles. Tragic 
as is the theme of a pair of married lovers parted for the nonce 
by villainous practices, he does not look for the storm of pas- 
sionate agony that destroyed Othello in every story involving 
jealousy; and he registers no complaints that King Cymbeline 
is not King Lear. Moreover, he feels that he can appreciate 
the wholly adequate portraiture of the lachimo without dis- 
cant on the stronger acid with which the picture of lago is 
bitten in, and delight in the sweet wifely devotion of Imogen 
without remembering that Cleopatra, on the stage in the pre- 
vious year, is a more astonishing personage. Wisdom, 
poetry, happiness of phrase, and sufficiency in dramatic por- 
traiture, so far as dramatic portraiture comports with the 
quality of the play, all are as characteristic of Cymheline as 
of other and earlier plays of Shakespeare. It is time to pro- 
test against the "discovery" that Shakespeare was prema- 
turely old and decaying in his genius at forty-five, careless in 
his art, and content to leave his throne to sit on the footstools 
of his younger contemporaries. 

The Winter s Tale, on the stage by i6io or i6ii, is a 
dramatized version of Pandosto, one of the most pleasing 
pastoral stories of Shakespeare's old competitor, Robert 
Greene. But when we say of any play of Shakespeare's that 
it is "a dramatized version," we are really noting one of its 
most trivial similarities to something that has gone before, 
a thing perhaps little more important than a mention of the 
material out of which the David of Michael Angelo had been 
chiseled or the Perseus of Cellini cast. Shakespeare, in 
The Winter s Tale, preserves the life of Hermione instead of 
permitting her, after her original, Bellaria in Greene's story, 
to die of grief Shakespeare's King Leontes, when his un- 



"THE WINTER'S TALE" 411 

reasonable jealousy and his wicked defiance of the oracle have 
lost him his wife and children, spends years, we are led to 
infer, in repentance and remains true to the memory of his 
unparalleled queen. This makes possible the reconciliation 
in the end and the joy and hope that springs from the res- 
toration of the lost ones and Perdita's marriage to her Prince 
Florizel. But it is not only in these and in several minor ^ 
changes that Shakespeare betters Greene's plot for dramatic 
use, but in the invention and introduction of new characters, 
Antigonus, incomparable Paulina, Mopsa, Dorcas, the clown, 
and above all Autolycus — all these are Shakespeare's inven- 
tion. Where in all Vagabondia shall we find so fascinating, 
so disreputable a rogue as Autolycus ? 

When daffodils begin to peer. 

With heigh ! the doxy over the dale, 
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year; 

For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. 

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge 

With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing! 

Doth set my pugging tooth on edge; 

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king. 

My traffic is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen. 
My father nam'd me Autolycus, who being, as I am, litter'd under 
Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. With 
die and drab I purchas'd this caparison, and my revenue is the silly 
cheat. Gallows and knock are too powerful on the highway; beating 
and hanging are terrors to me; for the life to come, I sleep out the 
thought of it. 

Last of the plays of Shakespeare comes The Tempest, 
acted, we know, during the festivities attending the marriage 
of the Princess Elizabeth to the Palsgrave in 1613, along with 
many other plays and the grand masques of Campion, Chap- 
man, and Beaumont, though certainly not written (as some 
have over-ingeniously surmised) for the occasion. In the 
autumn of 1610, news of the shipwreck of an EngHsh vessel, 
the Sea Venture, on the island of Bermuda, reached London. 
To the strangeness of the tropical landscape and the fact that 



412 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

the island was overrun by wild hogs, the superstition of the 
sailors had added that it was visited by strange sounds and 
haunted by the devil. Several pamphlets appeared on the 
topic. On this hint of the moment, Shakespeare seems to 
have constructed the plot of The Tempest, adding to the con- 
ception of a sea-isle haunted by unclean beasts (embodied in 
Caliban), the enchantment of Ariel, breathing in musical 
zephyrs and doing the will of a beneficent magician. The 
story of The Tempest is slight enough. It has recently been 
referred with confidence to "a collection of mediocre stories" 
entitled Noches de Invierno by an obscure Spanish author, 
Antonio de Eslava, published at Pamplona in the year 
1609. But, once more, do we read The Tempest any more 
than we read A Midsummer-Night's Dream only for the story ? 
And are we to expect any more of these lovely citizens of an 
enchanted island — with their ministering spirits and demons, 
even of their foils of the world without, on whom enchantments 
work miracles — those strong lines of personality that belong 
to the personages of Shakespeare whose struggle is with the 
primary passions of human nature ? Delicacy and elevation, 
as terms applied to the imagination, are not synonymous with 
weakness and attenuation. It is not "the big pow-pow man- 
ner," as Sir Walter Scott somewhere calls it, that alone in- 
dicates genius and the maintenance of poetic power. There 
are defects in The Tempest, exquisite production of a controlled 
imagination that it is; but these are less, if at all, the defects 
of failing powers, or due to the imitation of lesser men, than 
of that carelessness as to things in which he is not immediately 
interested which Shakespeare shows everywhere, but in smaller 
degree than almost any of his contemporaries among the 
dramatists. The Tempest was an immediate success and with 
The Winter s Tale continued popular long after the author's 
death, to be revived after the Restoration. There are those 
whose imaginations can not reach to the dramatist's art, and 
who therefore disbelieve in that high impersonality in which 
the author loses himself in his creations. To such The Tem- 
pest is only a last leaf in what they call Shakespeare's auto- 
biography, and explainable as an elaborated allegory in which 



"THE TEMPEST" 413 

Shakespeare took leave of the stage in the person of the magi- 
cian Prospero, abjuring his art in the well-known passage, 
concluding: 

I '11 break my staff, 
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, 
And deeper than did ever plummet sound 
I '11 drown my book. 

To those who recognize the larger nature of drama, who can 
grasp the idea of an art higher than that of the egotist, in the 
power of the true dramatic poet to thrill with a responsive 
sympathy for the emotion of any one of his personages, how- 
ever differently situated in life and feeling from himself, there 
is no need to interpret Prospero (nor any other of the characters 
that crowd his pages) as a projection of Shakespeare himself 
into his creative work. 

On the external side there is not much to chronicle as to 
the last years of the great poet's life. There seems reason to 
believe, from lately discovered material, that Shakespeare 
was later in London than 161 1, the usual date set by the 
biographers for his retirement to Stratford. It may be doubted 
if he gave up the stage altogether; though he must have parted 
with his shares in the Blackfriars and the Globe at some time 
between 1613, when he is recited in a legal document as a 
sharer, and the date of his death, when he was no longer such. 
Whatever the date of Shakespeare's retirement, he must have 
left in the hands of his company some plays incomplete and 
unfinished. We know that his position as chief dramatist 
to the King's company was immediately filled by Fletcher, 
and abundant evidence exists to show the association of the 
two men for a time in their craft. For example, in 1653 a 
bookseller named Moseley licensed for publication a play 
described as "The History ofCardenio by Fletcher and Shake- 
speare. " This was doubtless the play described as Cardenno 
or Cardenna, twice acted by the company of Shakespeare in 
1613. No trace of it exists, and it is doubtful if Moseley ob- 
tained the right to publish it. The Double Falsehood, a 
drama on what was doubtless the original in the Spanish of 



414 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

Cervantes of Cardenio, was published as Shakespeare's by 
Theobald in 1727; but there are no traces of the master's 
hand in it. 

Two plays, the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher, survive. 
These are The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry Fill. The 
former was first printed in 1634, with this statement on the 
title: "by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John 
Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare." Many critics have 
agreed to accept this ascription of authorship, though differ- 
ences of opinion have arisen as to how much is Shakespeare's 
and whether parts, at one time attributed to him, may not be 
revisions by the hand of Massinger. If Shakespeare is in 
The Two Noble Kinsmen, his part is confined to the main 
plot, Chaucer's Knight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite, already 
twice dramatized on the English stage. As for the rest of 
The Two Noble Kinsmen, it is not notable among the dramas 
of Beaumont and Fletcher, in the second folio of whose works, 
that of 1679, it was included. The question of authorship in 
Henry VHI is not dissimilar. It was during a performance of 
this play in June, 16 13, that a blazing wadding from a cannon 
on the stage of the Globe Theater ignited the thatch on the 
roof and burned the edifice to the ground. There is no proof 
that this was a first preformance, and it seems reasonable to 
believe (on the basis of allusions in the prologue oi Henry VHI 
to a play of Samuel Rowley, entitled JVhen Tou See Me Tou 
Know Me, 1604)5 that an earlier form of the Shakespearean 
play at some time existed. It is much more likely that Shake- 
speare should first have used such a subject when the recent 
death of Queen Elizabeth caused a momentary revival of 
interest in her history and in that of her parents, than it is to 
think that Shakespeare revived, without assignable reason, 
a kind of drama, out of fashion in 16 13 for nearly ten years. 
None the less we may feel sure that the play of Henry VIII 
as we have it is of approximately the latter period, and the 
hand of Fletcher seems unmistakable in it. The parts of 
King Henry, Katherine of Aragon, and Cardinal Wolsey for 
the most part, are written in the best manner of Shakespeare. 
Those who hold the alternative view, which assumes that 



FLETCHER'S COMEDIES OF MANNERS 415 

Shakespeare, in the parts that resemble Fletcher, deliberately 
imitated the latter, must explain why the mimicry was confined 
only to certain scenes and followed only the minor personages. 

Let us return to the dramatic career of Beaumont and 
Fletcher within the period of Shakespeare's life. Aside from 
Beaumont's Masque and his Woman Hater, 1606, a frank 
following of the Jonsonian comedy of humors, to Beaumont's 
single authorship is now usually assigned the diverting bur- 
lesque of the old heroical drama. The Knight of the Burning 
Pestle, 1607, a satire which the influence of Jonson, once 
more, may have suggested, and one by no means appreciated 
by the bourgeois auditors of the old plays therein ridiculed. 
On the other hand, Fletcher, too, indulged in experiment; 
and his attempt to popularize the exotic pastoral drama in 
The Faithful Shepherdess was, as we have seen, not more 
successful. There seems reason to believe that another early 
effort of Fletcher v.^as the comedy entitled The Woman's 
Prize or the Tamer Tamed, an entertaining sequel to Shake- 
speare's Taming of the Shrew, described above as the play in 
which Katherina, having died early, is succeeded by a second 
wife, Maria, who proceeds to tame the valiant Petruchio in 
a manner as vigorous as it is resourceful and complete. It 
was by way of such experiments that these clever young 
dramatists made their way to the inventive comedy of manners 
that Fletcher especially later practised and to the new drama 
of Philaster-type already described. 

Fletcherian comedy includes an interesting group of dramas 
of London life in which Middleton's art is at times bettered. 
Such plays are The Scornful Lady and Wit at Several Weapons, 
repeating several familiar comedy figures; Monsieur Thomas, 
in which a diverting variety of scapegrace who gives his name 
to the play is treated in foil with another of Fletcher's witty 
and capable women. Even better is Wit Without Money, 
in which the right of a free spirit to scorn what all men love 
is upheld with results which, thanks to another clever and 
understanding woman, the world does not always mete cut 
to such unthrifts. The Night Walker or the Little Thief is 
intricate and well plotted; but it descends in its representation 



4i6 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

of the lower haunts of the London of its day to a realism that 
outdoes Middleton at his lowest and suggests the degenerate 
comedies of Restoration times. All these plays fall between 
1607 and 16 15 and the dates of their writing, as well as the 
relations of the authorship of most of them, remain in dispute 
among the critics. In several plays Fletcher carried the 
comedy of contemporary manners over into foreign countries, 
sketching, none the less, from his countrymen about him. The 
Coxcomb, of indeterminate scene, mingles characters with 
Italian and EngUsh names, and combines a plot containing 
romantic elements with comedy of manners. Ricardo, the 
hero, seems in his weakness for the wine-cup and his remorse 
for the consequences of that weakness, a reminiscence of 
Cassio. Other examples of such plays within our period are 
The Captain, an unpleasing story, the scene Venice; and The 
Honest Mans Fortune, laid in Paris. In this last excellent 
comedy is set forth the effects, on true friends and false, of 
a loss of fortune in the case of a gentleman, Montaigne, of 
admirable character and fortitude. Both these plays have 
been dated near to 1613. In the latter, Fletcher was only the 
ruling spirit of four collaborators. 

More akin to the tragicomedies of Philaster-type for the 
romantic element in them are such comedies as The Beggars^ 
Bush, which has been thought to have been originally the 
work of Beaumont, and the several beautiful tragicomedies 
in which Fletcher laid under contribution the wealth of story 
which the literature of Spain, then in the height of its bloom, 
was spreading over Europe. Although The Knight of the 
Burning Pestle is directly referable to Don Quixote, it was not 
until a year or two before Shakespeare's death that Fletcher, 
apparently, showed English dramatists the way to the treasures 
of Spanish literature. Strange as it may seem, there is no 
reason to believe that Fletcher was acquainted with the Span- 
ish language, for all his sources of this kind are traceable in 
translations, principally French. Even more strange is it 
that no one of the contemporaries of Shakespeare has as yet 
been proved to have borrowed unmistakably from the con- 
temporary Spanish drama. Cervantes and several of his 



"THE MAID'S TRAGEDY" 417 

countrymen furnished material to the playwrights of the 
later time of James and of Charles, but all these sources are 
in fiction. The drama of Lope de Vega and Cervantes had 
practically no touch with that of Shakespeare and Fletcher. 
In The Chances, 16 15, perhaps Fletcher's earliest play on a 
Spanish original, levy is made on the famous Novelas Exem- 
plares of Cervantes with the result of a very charming comedy, 
somewhat hardened in line and broadened in humor as 
compared with its admirable original. The Chances con- 
tinued long a popular play. Of none of the other Spanish 
plays in which Fletcher had a hand can we be sure that they 
were written within the period before us. 

With respect to Fletcherian tragedy, there can be little 
question of the excellence of The Maid's Tragedy however 
its " Philaster-types, " if critics will so have it, were staled on 
the later stage by incessant repetition. There is a quality 
so truly heroic in worldly and wicked Evadne, suddenly 
awakened from the security of her sin to the enormity of it, 
there is ' something, too, so pitiful in the faltering Amintor, 
whose spaniel-like fidelity to the king who has wronged and 
outraged him almost as man was never wronged and outraged 
before, that we are carried away by the originality of their 
story as well as by the pathos of the unhappy page-maiden 
Aspasia and the pervading poetic spirit of the whole drama. 
Fletcher never bettered The Maid's Tragedy. Perhaps he 
never again in tragedy worked in such perfect adjustment 
with his friend Beaumont. But several other Fletcherian 
tragedies are memorable. Passing Cupid's Revenge, a lesser 
play of the Philaster-group, we find the next tragedy, now to 
be placed before 16 14, in Bonduca which from its subject, the 
clash of ancient Britain with Rome, suggests the background 
o£ Cymbeline, Bonduca is a signal example of Fletcher's 
happy art in construction. The story of Boadicea and that 
of Caractacus, in defiance of history, are happily combined 
in one plot; and the touch of a genuine pathos infused in the 
invented story of the little Prince Hengo. Fletcher's Caratach 
is a fine heroic character, sure to be effective in the hands of 
a robust and declamatory actor; and the difiicult war scenes 



4i8 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

are handled with a restraint and ability to suggest where 
portrayal is impossible, that causes us to reaHze how far we 
have traveled from the crude realism of the old chronicle 
plays. In the following passage we can feel Fletcher's power 
of pathos. Caratach is in flight with the little Prince Hengo 
whom he has preserved among many perils, and the Roman 
soldiers are close upon their tracks : 

Caratach. How does my boy ? 

Hengo. I would do well; my heart's well; 
I do not fear. 

Car. My good boy! 

Hengo. I know, uncle, 
We must all die; my little brother died, 
I saw him die, and he died smiling; sure. 
There 's no great pain in 't, uncle. But, pray, tell me, 
Whither must we go when we are dead ? 

Car. Strange questions! — [Aside. 

Why, the blessed'st place, boy! ever sweetness 
And happiness dwells there. 

Hengo. Will you come to me ? 

Car. Yes, my sweet boy. 

Hengo. Mine aunt too, and my cousins ? 

Car. All, my good child. 

Hengo. No Romans, uncle ? 

Car. No, boy. 

Hengo. I should be loth to meet them there. 

Car. No ill men. 
That live by violence and strong oppression. 
Come hither; 't is for those the gods love, good men. 

Hengo. Why, then, I care not when I go, for surely 
I am persuaded they love me: I never 
Blasphemed 'em, uncle, nor transgressed my parents; 
I always said my prayers. 

Car. Thou shalt go, then, 
Indeed thou shalt. 

Hengo. When they please. 

Car. That 's my good boy! 
Art thou not weary, Hengo ? 

Hengo. Weary, uncle! 
I have heard you say you have marched all day in armor. 



"BONDUCA" AND "VALENTINIAN" 419 

Car. I have, boy. 

Hengo. Am not I your kinsman ? 

Car. Yes. 

Hengo. And am not I as fully allied unto you 
In those brave things as blood ? 

Car. Thou art too tender — 

Hengo. To go upon my legs ? they were made to bear me. 
I can play twenty mile a-day; I see no reason, 
But, to preserve my country and myself, 
I should march forty. 

Car. What wouldst thou be, living 
To wear a man's strength! 

Hengo. Why, a Caratach, 
A Roman-hater, a scourge sent from Heaven 
To whip these proud thieves from our kingdom. Hark! 

[Drum wtthtn. 

Scarcely less interesting is the only other tragedy of Fletcher 
that falls within our scope, Valentinian, also now to be placed 
before 16 14. This contribution of Fletcher to tragedy on 
classic story is almost as pervasively romantic in tone as that 
which touches the field of chronicle history. Here, out of an 
obscure anecdote of Procopius, the dramatist has constructed 
a tragedy in which, although his favorite types — the lustful 
tyrant, the steadfast wife, the bluff heroic soldier — recur, all 
is so adequately and so admirably expressed and handled with 
so sure a hand that we wonder why the Fletcherian art, not- 
withstanding, does not fully satisfy.^ 

Fletcher, when all has been said, is the completest of Eng- 
lish dramatists, and this was alike his distinction and his se- 
rious limitation. The poetry of Marlowe, more commonly his 
passion, bore forward his drama, until he attained the control 
oi Edward II, and even then the art of tragedy was as yet form- 
ative. Jonson was the playwright of theory, though often of 

^ The only two other plays of Fletcher, usually dated prior to 
1616, are Thierry and Theodoret which, however, based on an earlier 
play, is, as we have it and for its political allusions, properly placed 
after 161 7. Love's Cure, sometimes placed at 1606, is founded on a 
play of De Castro, printed in Spain for the first time about a month 
before Fletcher's death. It is probably not his. 



420 SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER 

most triumphant practice. But he went ever his own way, 
gratified and complaisant if the public went with him, stubborn 
and intractable when the tide was against him. Shakespeare 
had the finer gift, to seem to follow where he really led, to guide 
his public and raise it to an appreciation of his own artistic 
standards. This he did less by the persistent presentation of 
ideals, impossible of attainment, than by that human element in 
his art that offers to each man some one intimate point of 
contact thus to touch life at innumerable points. Fletcher 
was above all an adaptable genius. There was a great drama- 
tic literature behind him to warn him and to guide There 
were the great men, his fellow dramatists, practising their art 
around him. And there was the stage itself, with its traditions 
and its practical lessons, and that difficult, exacting, and untam- 
able Jacobean audience. To all these things Fletcher read- 
ily adjusted himself and determined from the first that his aud- 
itors should have what they craved. To this end he toned 
up his plays, heightening every contrast, hastening the rapidity 
of the action, sharpening the surprise of climax and the unex- 
pectedness of the outcome. And in this process he unknit the 
sequence of cause and effect. The plays of Fletcher and his 
group are less true to the ethics of life and of art than the 
greater drama that preceded them. Dryden thought that 
Fletcher could draw a better gentleman for the stage than could 
Shakespeare; and, as to the conventions, doubtless, of social 
life and intercourse, the gentlemen of Fletcher's drawing were 
nearer in their conduct and conversation to the gentlemen 
of Dryden's time than were the latter to the larger and more 
universally veritable figures of Shakespeare. Elizabethan 
drama rose rapidly from the flats ofGorhoJuc and Gammer Gur- 
/o?z, reaching beetling cliffs in Marlowe, and heights that pierced 
the sky, with much that was more pleasant and habitable at 
lower levels in the royal domain of Shakespeare and his immedi- 
ate fellows. Fletcher leads us downward in a long, but not too 
precipitous decline, diversified from time to time with highland 
kindred to the mountainous region that we have left behind us; 
reproducing much of its fauna and, in particular, its lovely poet- 
ical flora. There are other highlands on the broad map of Eng- 



PROSE AT SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH 421 

lish drama; but they concern us not. The range of Elizabethan 
drama, too, is to be measured by its depths as well as by its 
heights, by its deserts as well as by its cultivatable lands. 
To vary the figure, there has been no drama of such an ampli- 
tude of vibration, so tuned to respond, a universal resonator, 
to the infinite varieties and degrees of the emotions and pas- 
ions of men. 

When Shakespeare died, in April, 1616, King James was at 
the height of his reign; and the Stuart tenets of absolute king- 
ship in church and state had already hardened the Puritan tem- 
per and provoked the parliamentary struggle that, leading 
inevitably to rebellion, was to cost his son and successor his 
throne and his life. These things concerned the future, and 
as yet little affected English daily life. The king's weak and 
disgraceful rule, on the other hand, was more patent to the 
world; his infatuation for his favorites, his condoning of folly 
and worse, the extravagance that prompted extortion and ille- 
gal taxation, the corruption of the courts, and the suppression 
of Parliament: these were some of the portents of the day. 
And yet to the superficial observer, the times were prosper- 
ous and the arts were as flourishing as in the days of Elizabeth. 

Richard Hakluyt died in the same year with Shakespeare; 
with him closed the long and interesting chapter of England's 
early maritime adventure. An occasional pamphlet or drama 
of old fashion, or a belated adventurer, like Captain John 
Smith, might respond to the memory of the perils and escapes, 
the bravery and heroic daring that made the old sea-dogs 
the terror of the Spanish ocean. But with the execution of 
Raleigh, two years later, the last of the old Devonian heroes 
was gone, and the sons of the men who had hunted the Armada 
to the Hebrides and back into the Irish sea, now contemplated 
with indifference the alliance of an English prince with an In- 
fanta of Spain. But if one form of English prose had lost its 
old insular national spirit, English style in general continued to 
develop into a simpler and less labored instrument for the ex- 
pression of the complexities of modern thought, leaving Euphu- 
ism and Arcadianism behind it, and much of its Latinism as 



422 NEW BOOKS AND OLD 

well, though still destined to undergo a relapse into the florid, 
the cumbrous and involved, before it reached the reasonable 
directness of Dryden. As to the varieties of prose, none fol- 
lowed in the reign of the second Stuart which had not been 
abundantly presaged before King James had been long on his 
throne. The pamphlet and occasional broadside continued, 
assuming more and more the character of the newspaper that 
was yet to be, and taking on with the trend of the time an in- 
creasingly bitter political and satirical nature. Wither is an 
example of a sweet poet and amiable man turned to the 
austerity of Puritanism and the rancor of the libeler by 
this spirit of his day. The essay, for the same reason, was 
succeeded in popular esteem by the "character," wherein 
much was sacrificed to the" palpable hit"; and even history, 
as later with Clarendon, was conceived as meriting praise 
when it sparkled with the wit of satirical portraiture cleverly 
essayed. 

Among new books in prose, in the closing years of Shake- 
speare's life, were Daniel's History of England and Hall's Con- 
templations, Alexander's completion of the Arcadia, Raleigh's 
History of the World, Selden's Titles of Honor, and his History 
of Tithes. Camden's Annals of Queen Elizabeth appeared in 
1615. In this same year Breton's Characters showed the 
immediate influence of the second edition of Bacon's Essays, 
published three years earlier. As to Breton's pamphlets at 
large, of the thirty or more titles attributed to him, at least 
twenty had appeared by 1616. Dekker, too, to mention only 
one other pampheteer, had put out some thirteen booklets of 
this class — few of them reprinted — up to this date. But 
later editions of old books, better than new, disclose contem- 
porary taste. In 16 10, Foxe's Book of Martyrs reached a sixth 
edition, not to be reprinted until 1632. The year 16 12 saw the 
fourth edition of North's Plutarch; the following year the 
Arcadia in a sixth, and Euphues in a ninth issue. Lower down 
in the scale of fiction, Munday's Palmerin of England attained 
a third edition in 16 16, his A mad is de Gaule, a second three 
years later. 

As to non-dramatic poetry, Spenser, Sidney, Drayton, and 



POETRY AT SHAKESPEARE'S DEATH 423 

Daniel were the four most popular Elizabethan poets. The 
first collected edition of Spenser appeared in 161 1, following 
thirteen issues of separate poems or partial collections, within 
the poet's life. Astrophel and Stella, after three editions in the 
single year 1591, was always reprinted with the Arcadia, thus 
issuing for the seventh time in 1613. Daniel edited his non- 
dramatic poetry four times in his lifetime (he died in 16 19) 
and there were fifteen separate editions of his poems, and 
dramas besides; while Drayton edited the third and best 
edition of his works in 16 19, three more appearing later, and 
issued, besides, seventeen separate editions of individual works. 
One of the most popular poems of the time was Warner's Al- 
bion s England, which reached an eighth edition by 1612; a 
fourth edition of Sir John Davies' Nosce Teipsum appeared in 
161 8, a fifth before the date of the Shakespeare folio. 
Fletcher's Christ's Victory and Triumph, Browne's Britannia' s 
Pastorals, and Wither's The Shepherd's Pipe disclose the con- 
tinued popularity of the Spenserian mode between 1610 and 
1 6 16. Lower in the scale of literature, Davies of Hereford 
had issued a dozen pamphlets in verse, Breton more than a 
score up to the same date; whilst in translation the year 1616 
was signalized by the final collection of The Whole Works of 
Homer by Chapman, a sixth edition of the earliest parts, and 
this, besides the laborious poet's other activities in the drama 
and in nearly a dozen other volumes of original verse. Well 
may we pause to consider such an activity (only partially in- 
dicated here) in a metropoUtan community that had not yet 
reached two hundred thousand souls, the center of a nation 
scarcely numbering three millions; a community, moreover, in 
which the proportion of readers by reason of illiteracy must 
have been perhaps three in ten, and one in which the high 
proportionate cost of books must still further have limited the 
possible number of purchasers. 

But the most important single volume, published in the year 
of Shakespeare's death, was the first folio of the collected 
works of Ben Jonson. Jonson is the earliest English dra- 
matic poet so to appear, and the only one to superintend such 
an edition of his works himself. His popularity demanded a 



4-24 WORKS OF THE DRAMATISTS 

second edition in 1632, which was completed in 1641, some 
four years after the poet's death. Jonson is also the only Eliz- 
abethan dramatist who saw a collected edition of his own works 
in print; for although a larger number of Shakespeare's plays, 
singly and in quarto, "escaped into print" during his lifetime 
than of any other playwright, the great dramatist had been dead 
seven years before the famous first folio of 1623 ^^^ printed. 
Jonson's works were published, for a third time, in 1692; the 
two foHo editions of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher date 
1647 and 1679. But Shakespeare demanded publication four 
times — in 1623, 1632, 1663-1664, and 1685 — within the 
period up to 1700. Only two other of Shakespeare's actual 
dramatic contemporaries were collected even imperfectly before 
the time of the Restoration: these were Lyly, whose Six Court 
Comedies dates 1 632, and Marston, whose Works, containing 
an equal number of his plays, appeared in the next year. 

In the drama, the exit of Shakespeare and the next few 
years marked a momentous change. Henslowe died in the 
same year with Shakespeare and with him passed away the old 
methods of theatrical management; for his son-in-law, Alleyn 
the actor, now long since retired and married to his second wife, 
a daughter of Dr. Donne, the poet and Dean of St. Paul's, 
had put away his humble and sordid past, and had founded 
Dulwich College to preserve therein Henslowe's Diary and 
other treasures for the antiquarian of our Elizabethan drama. 
In 1619 Richard Burbage died. Burbage had made the title 
roles of Shakespeare as Alleyn had made those of Marlowe. 
With these two gone, and some of the elder comedians as well, 
the older ways of acting, too, must have suffered a change 
which, in view of the greater prevalence of melodrama, senti- 
mentality, masquing, and scenic display, could scarcely have 
been altogether a change for the better. But although the 
drama, strictly Elizabethan, was now succeeded in the popu- 
lar esteem by tragicomedies and comedies of contemporary 
life, and its range and artistic appeal was becoming more and 
more restricted, with Puritanism withdrawn from the theaters 
and the more serious-minded intent on the political struggle 
impending, we must remember that Shakespeare's plays and 



THE SUPREMACY OF SHAKESPEARE 425 

the earlier successes of Marlowe, Jonson, and others still held 
the stage with Fletcher and Shirley and what came after. 

The age of Shakespeare knew, as every age in English- 
speaking lands since has known, that in Shakespeare the world 
has aUke its truest dramatist and its greatest poet. To escape 
his rule and sway it is not in the nature of ignorance nor 
criticism to effect, however the alien moralist may display the 
limitations of his own comprehension or native Philistinism 
may deliver its diatribes against Shakespeare's poetry, his eth- 
ics, or his art. It is not in the nature of things human 
to withstand forever the inroads of time. The beautiful 
imagery of the poets that tells of gold-laden galleons, ly- 
ing in the depths of the ocean, their treasures jeweling, the 
floor of the sea, is denied by the stubborn facts of science. 
Sea-water is the universal solvent wherein even gold is 
tarnished and all at last reduced to the universal sHme. So, 
too, the wealth of this great literature of Shakespeare and his 
fellows must yield perceptibly to the universal solvent, time; 
what was bright becomes tarnished, what was vitally signifi- 
cant, recoverable by the plodding student alone, to him an ob- 
ject of curious lore far more than the inevitable reality or the 
adored ideal that it was to the man of Elizabeth's day. Yet 
who will say that this is all ? Homer still lives, and he is 
bold who will set limits to his immortality. And there remains, 
too, in this incomparable literature of the greatest age of 
modern times, more than enough that will continue sound, 
significant, and potent for generations and generations to 
come, long after our petty triumphs of to-day shall have 
perished, irrevocably from the memories of men. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

This bibliography makes no pretensions to completeness. 
Its chief concern is the representation, in a condensed form, of 
the Hterary activity of the writers discussed in this book; its 
second, an indication as to where these authors may be read 
in modern available editions. Works of critical comment 
have been to a large degree ignored, not from a want of 
appreciation of the admirable results of modern scholarship, 
but from a conviction that, in the study of literature, a knowl- 
edge at first hand of what the author has written is the one 
supreme and important thing. 

The following items are arranged first by the name of the 
author; secondly by title, where the book is anonymous or 
the work of several authors. A few subject-titles are added 
where the matter is not otherwise covered. A few abbrevia- 
tions, mostly obvious, are employed. An exponent (thus 
1632^) means that more than one edition was issued in the 
same year. Well known collections, such as Dodsley's Old 
English Plays, and Chalmers' English Poets are alluded to 
by the author's name only. Garner signifies Arhers English 
Garner, new edition by Sidney Lee; D. N. B., the Dictionary 
of National Biography. 

Addlington, William, fl. 1565. The Golden Ass of Apuleius. 
1566, four edd. to 1596. Tudor Translations, ed. C. Whibley, 1892. 

Alabaster, William, 1567-1640. Roxana Tragedia, 1632, 
Controversial works and a few scattered poems. 

Alexander, Sir William (Earl of Stirling), 1567-1640. Aurora, 
1604; Monarchic Tragedies, 1 603-1 607. Ed. Rogers, 1877, 2 vols. 

Allott, Robert, fl. 1600. Editor of Wit's Theater; extracts from 
ancient authors, 1599; England's Parnassus, 1600, repr. Park, 
Heliconia, 1815. 

Andrews. Lancelot (Bishop of Winchester), 1 555-1 626. Russel, 
Life and Works, 1863; Church, in Masters of English Theology, iSjy. 

427 



428 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Anton, Robert, fl. 1616. Moriomachia, 1613; Philosophers' 
Satires, 1616; Vice's Anatomy, 1 61 7. 

Arden of Feversham, 1592, 1599, 1 633. Ed. Bullen, 1887; ed. 
Bayne, Temple Dramatists, 1897. 

Armin, Robert, fl. 1610. Fool upon Fool, 1605, repr. as A Nest 
of Ninnies, 1608, in Sh. Soc. Publ., 1842. The Two Maids of 
Moreclacke, 1609. 

AwDELEY, John, fl. 1559-1577. Fraternity of Vagabonds, 1565, 
three edd. Repr. The Shakespeare Library, 1907. 

Bacon, Francis, 1561-1626. Controversies in the Church, 1587; 
Essays, 1597, 1612, 1625; ^^^ Advancement of Learning, 1605, ed. 
Chase, 1906; De Sapientia Veterum, 1609; Certain Considerations 
touching the Plantation in Ireland, 1609; Novum Organum, 1620— 
1658 in various separate publications, ed. Fowler, 1878; History of 
Henry VH, 1622; De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum, 1623; 
Apophthegms, 1624; Psalms, 1625; Sylva Sylvarum, 1627; The New 
Atlantis, 1629; Maxims of the Law, 1630; and various other post- 
humous publications, 1 638-1 671. Collected ed. Spedding, Ellis and 
Heath, 1857-59, 7 vols. See also Spedding, Life and Times of Bacon, 
1878, 2 vols.; and Church, in Men of Letters Series, 1889; Essays 
often reprinted. Poems, ed. Grosart, Fuller Worthies' Miscellanies, 
i, 1870. See Bibliography, Cambridge History of Literature, 1 9 10, 
vol. iv. 

Baldwin, William, fl. 1559. See Mirror for Magistrates. 

Barnes, Barnabe, l569?-l6o9. Parthenophil and Parthenope, 
1593; repr. Garner, Sonnets, i; A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets, 
1595, repr. Park, Heliconia, ii. 1815. The Devil's Charter, 1607, ed. 
McKerrow, Mater ialien zur Kunde, vi, 1904. 

Barnfield, Richard, i 574-1 627. The Affectionate Shepherd, 
1594; Cynthia, 1595; Lady Pecunia, 1598, 1605; the last two reprinted 
by Collier, Reprints, 1866, i. Poems, ed. Arber, English Scholar's 
Library, 1 882, and Garner, Longer Elizabethan Poems, 1903. 

Barrey, Lodowick, Ram-Alley, 1611, 1636, 1639, Dodsley x. 

Basse, William, 1583-1653. Sword and Buckler, 1602; various 
elegies and commendatory poems, between 1602 and 1653; Pastorals, 
first printed by Collier, Miscellaneous Tracts, 1870; Polyhymnia, first 
printed in Poetical Works of W. B^, ed. Bond, 1893. 

Bastard, Thomas, 1566-16 18. Chrestoleros, 1598. Poems, ed. 
Grosart, Occasional Issues, 1880. 

Beaumont, Francis, 1584-1616. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 
1602; Poems, 1640, enlarged 1 653, and reprinted as The Golden 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 429 

Remains of Beaumont and Fletcher, 1660. All these are doubtfully 
Beaumont's. Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, 1613. 
For the dramas see Fletcher, John. Poems, repr. in modern edd. of 
Beaumont and Fletcher. 

Bedingfield, Thomas, d. 1613. Cardanus' Comfort, 1573; 
The Florentine History of Macchiavelli, 1595; repr. Tudor Transla- 
tions, 1905; and other works. 

Bellum Grammaticale, 1635. Not reprinted. See Sh. Jahrbuch, 
xxxiv. 

Bible, Erasmus, New Testament, Lat. (with Gk. text), 151 6, 
various edd. and Latin paraphrases, to 1524. Tyndale, New Testa- 
ment in English, 1525^, facsimile repr. Fry, 1862, ed. Arber, 1871; 
Pentateuch, 1530, some forty edd. of these two (usually together) to 
1553. Coverdale Bible (complete), 1535^ (one of these, the first Bible 
printed in England); 1537, New Testament, 1538, revised; whole 
Bible, 1539; Matthews, 1537, 1539; Taverner, 1539; Great Bible, 
1539, 1540^ 1541^. Whittingham, 1557 (part), Geneva Bible, 1560, 
eighty-six edd. to 161 1 ; Bishops' Bible (Parker), 1568, revised 1572, 
twenty edd. to 1606; Rheims New Testament^ 1582, Douay Old 
Testament, 1609, few edd.; Authorized Version or King James' Bible, 
1 6 1 1 . Upwards of a score of edd. to 1 6 1 6. 

F. H. A. Scrivener, The Authorized Edition of the Bible, 1884; 
A. S. Cook, The Bible and English Prose Style, 1892; F. A. Gasquet, 
The Old English Bible, 1897; R. G. Moulton, The Literary Study of 
the Bible, 1 899; A. Wright, A General History of the Bible, 1 905; 
J. H. Gardiner, The Bible as Literature, 1906; J. I. Mombert, English 
Versions of the Bible, 1907. 

Blenerhasset, Thomas, 1550 ?-i625 ?. The Second Part of the 
Mirror for Magistrates, 1 578, See Mirror for Magistrates. 

BoDENHAM, John, fl. 1597. Reputed editor of Wit's Common- 
wealth, 1597; Belvedere or the Garden of the Muses, 1600, repr. Spenser 
Society, 1875; England's Helicon, 1 600, ed. Bullen, 1887. 

?BowER, Richard. Appius and Virginia, 1575, repr. Dodsley, iv. 

Braithwaite, Richard, 1588 ?-i673. The Golden Fleece, 161 1; 
The Poet's Willow, The Prodigal's Tears, and The Scholar's Medley, 
all in 1614; A Strappado for the Devil, 1615; and twenty-four later 
tracts in verse or prose. 

Breton, Nicholas, 1545 ?-i626 ?. The Works of a Toung Wit, A 
Flourish upon Fancy, both 1577, the latter in part reprinted in Park, 
Heliconia, 1815; Pasquil's Madcap, Fool's Cap, Pasquil's Pass, all 
1600, the first also 1605; The Soul's Harmony, 1602; The Passionate 



430 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Shepherd, 1604, and fifteen other volumes of verse to An Invective 
Against Treason, 1616. Wit's Trenchamour, 1597; A Packet of 
Madcap Letters, 1603, many edd. to 1685; An Old Man's Lesson, 1605^ 
Characters upon Essays, 1615; The Good and the Bad, 1616, 1648 
and seventeen other prose pamphlets to Fantastics, 1626. 

Some seventeen other works have been attributed to Breton; see 
bibliography in Morley, English Writers, xi. Collected ed. Grosart^ 
1879 (not quite complete), 2 vols. See Tappan, The Poetry of B. 
Publ. Mod. Lang. Asso., 1898; Kuskop, B. und seine Prosaschriften,. 
1902. 

Bright, Timothy, 1551 ?-i6i5. Abridgement of Foxe's Book of 
Martyrs, 158 1, 1 589; various medical pamphlets; Character ie, "an art 
of short, swift and secret writing," 1588; repr. J. H. Ford, 1888. 

Brinsley, John, fl. 161 2. Ludus Liter arius, or the Grammar 
School, 1612, 1627, and several other educational works and transla- 
tions. 

Brooke, Arthur, d. 1563. Romeus and Juliet, 1562. Ed. 
Munro, The Shakespeare Library, 1908. 

Brooke, Christopher, d. 1628. The Ghost of Richard Illy 
1614; contributor to Britannia's Pastorals, 1613, and The Shepherd's 
Pipe, 1614. See Browne, William, and Wither. Ed. Grosart, Fuller 
Worthies' Miscellanies, 1872, iii. 

Brooke, Lord, see Greville, Fulke. 

Browne,William (of Tavistock), 1591-1643 .^ Britannia's Pas- 
torals, 1613-16, 1625; The Shepherd's Pipe, 161 i\.; Masque of the Inner 
Temple {Ulysses and Circe), in Works, ed. Davies, 1772, 3 vols.; 
Poems, ed. G. Goodwin, The Muses' Library, 1 894, See also F. 
W. Moorman, William Browne, 1897. 

Brydges, John (Dean of Salisbury). Alleged author oi Gammer 
Gurton. See Ross, in Anglia, xix; but see Stevenson, William. 

Bryskett, Lodowick, fl. 1571-1611. Discourse of Civil Life, 
i6o62. 

Buc, Sir George, d. 1623. Daphnis Poly Stephanos, 1605, 2nd 
ed. (under title The Great Plantagenet), 1635; The Third University of 
England, 1615; History of Richard III, 1646. 

Byrd, William, 1538 .''-1623. Musician and publisher of music; 
probably not a poet. Psalms, Sontiets, 1588; Songs of Sundry 
Natures, 1589, 1610; Second Book of Songs, 1611. All in Garner, 
Shorter Poems, 1903. 

Camden, William, 1551-1623. Britannia, 1586, six edd. to 1607, 
transl. 1610, 1637; repr. R. Gough, 1806, 4 vols.; Remains Concerning 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 431 

Britain, 1605, seven edd. to 1674; Annals, 1615 and nine edd. to 1688, 
repr. ed. Hearne, 171 7, 3 vols. Other minor works. 

Campion, Edmund, 1540-1581. See Simpson, Edmund Campion, 
a Biography, 1867. 

Campion, Thomas, d. 161 9. Poemata, 1595, 161 9; A Book of 
Airs, 1601; Observations in the Art of Poesy, 1602; The Lord's 
Masque, pr. Nichols, Progresses of King James, 1828, ii; Two 
Books of Airs, 1613; Songs of Mourning, 1613; Counterpoint, 1613; 
Third and Fourth Book of Airs, 161J; Works (complete), ed. Bullen, 
1889. Selections, E. Rhys, The Lyric Poets, 1895. The Song Books 
also in Garner, Shorter Poems, 1903. Ed. S. P. Vivain, English 
Poems, 1910. 

Carew, Richard, 1555-1620. Godfrey of Bulloigne, transl. 1594. 
Repr. Grosart, Occasional Issues, 1 881. See Retrospective Review, 
1 82 1, and Koeppel in Anglia, xi. 

Carey, Robert (Earl of Monmouth), 1560-1639. Memoirs, first 
printed by Walpole, 1759. "Account of the death of Elizabeth," 
Garner, Stuart Tracts, 1 903. 

Cecil, William (Lord Burleigh), 1 520-1 598. Certain Precepts 
for the Well-ordering of a Man's Life, 1 61 7, six edd. to 1783. In 
later ones called Lord Burleigh's Advice to his Son. 

Chapman, George, 1559 .''-1634. The Shadows of Night, 1594. 
The Tears of Peace, 1609; Andromeda Liberata, 1614; and seven other 
publications of original verse to A Justification of Nero, 1629. 

Ovid's Banquet of Sense, 1 595; Hero and Leander, completed, 
1598; Homer, Iliad, 1598-1611; Odyssey, 1614; Whole Works of 
Homer, 1616; Hymns, etc., 1624; Hesiod, 1618; Juvenal, Satire V, 
1629. 

The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 1598; A Humorous Day's Mirth, 
1599; All Fools, 1605; Eastward Hoe (with Jonson and Marston), 
1605^; Monsieur D'Olive, 1606; The Gentleman Usher, 1606; Bussy 
D'Ambois, 1607, five edd. to 1657; The Conspiracy of Byron, 1608, 
1625; May Day, 1611; The Widow's Tears, 1612; The Revenge of 
Bussy D'Ambois, 1613; Pompey and Caesar, 1631^, 1653; The Ball, 
1639; Chabot, 1639 (these two with Shirley); Alphonsus of Germany, 
and Revenge for Honor, both 1 654, are not by Chapman. Dramatic 
Works, ed. Pearson, 1873, 3 vols.; Complete Works, ed. Shepherd 
(inferior), 1874-75, 3 vols. Selected dramas, ed. Mermaid (Phelps), 
1895; Belles Lettres Series (Boas, 1905, Parrott, 1907), four plays, 2 
vols. Homer, ed. Hooper, 1857, 5 vols. Bibliography, Morley, En' 
glish Writers, xi. 



432 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Characters. See Hall, Joseph; Overbury; Breton. H. Morley, 
Character Writing of the Seventeenth Century ^ 1 891; Greenough, 
Studies in the Development of Character Writing, 1 898; Whibley, in 
Blackwood's, 1909. 

Chester, Robert, I566?-i640.\ Love's Martyr, 1601; repr. 
New Sh. Soc, 1878. 

Chettle, Henry, 1564-5 ?-l6o7 ?. Kind-Heart's Dream, 1 593, 
repr. Sh.Allusion Books,New Sh. iSoc.,1874; Pierce Plain's Apprentice- 
ship, 1593; Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington (2 parts 
with Munday), 1601, repr. Hazlitt's Dodsley, viii, 1874; Patient 
Grissil (with Dekker and Haughton), 1603, repr. Sh. Soc., 1841; 
Hoffman, 1631, repr. Ackermann, 1894, with bibliography. Eng- 
land's Mourning Garment, 1604, also in Sh. Allusion Books, as above. 

Chronicle Plays. See Schelling, The English Chronich Play, 
1902; and Bibliographical Essay, Elizabethan Drama, 1908, by the 
same. 

Churchyard, Thomas, 1520 ?-i6o4. Between Shore's Wife con- 
tributed to The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. 1 563, and Churchyard's 
Good Will, 1603, some forty tracts in verse mostly, moral, devotional, 
historical, personal, elegiac, etc. The best is The Worthies of Wales, 
1587, ed. Spenser Soc. 1 87 1. Select works are reprinted in Nichol's 
Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, The Harleian Miscellany, and Collier's 
English Poetical Miscellanies. 

College Drama. See Elizabethan Drama, chapter xiv, and biblio- 
graphy. Also Churchill and Keller, Sh. Jahrbuch, xxxiv, 1898. 

Constable, Henry, i 562-1 61 3. Diana, 1592, 1594, Gamer, 
Sonnets, ii; Spiritual Sonnets, first pr. Park, Heliconia, ii. Ed. Hazlitt, 
complete, 1859. 

Contention between the Houses of Tork and Lancaster, I and 2, see 
Pseudo-Shakespeare. 

Cooke, Joshua, fl. 1602. How a Man may Choose a Good 
Wife, 1602, repr. Dodsley, ix. 

Cooper, Thomas (Bishop of Winchester), 1517 ?-i594. See 
Marprelate Controversy. 

CoRYATE, Thomas, 1577-1617. Crudities, 161 1; repr. Glasgow, 
1905, 2 vols; Coryate's Crambe, 161 1; The Oldcombian Banquet, 1611; 
Traveller of the English Wits, 1616; Letter from Agra, 1616. 

CovERDALE, MiLES, 1488-1568, See Bible. 

Cranmer, Thomas (Archbishop of Canterbury), 1489-1556. 
Remains, Parker Soc, 1844-6, 2 vols.; and see Bible. 

Criticism, Elizabethan Poetic, and Verse. See Haslewood, Ancient 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 433 

Critical Essays, l8ll, 2 vols.; Schelling, Elizabethan Verse Criticism, 
1893; Saintsbury, History of English Criticism, 1900-1904, 3 vols. 
G. G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1904. 

Cromwell, Chronicle History of Thomas Lord, 1602, 1613, Hazlitt, 
Doubtful Plays of Shakespeare, 1887. See Pseudo-Shakespeare. 

Daborne, Robert, fl. 1613. The Christian Turned Turk, 1612; 
The Poor Man's Comfort, 1 655, both reprinted in Anglia, xx, xxi, 
1897-98. 

Danett, Thomas, fl. 1600. Description of the Low Countries, 
1593; History of C amines, 1 596. 

Daniel, Samuel, 1562-1619. Delia, i^gi; Delia with The Com- 
plaint of Rosamund, 1592^, 1594; Cleopatra, 1594; Civil Wars, 1595- 
1609; Musophilus, 1599; Defense of Rime, 1602; Vision of the Twelve 
Goddesses, 1604; Philotas, 1605; The Queen s Arcadia, 1606; Tethys' 
Festival, 1610; History of England, 1612-1617; Hymen's Triumph, 
1615. Five collective edd. of varying contents, 1599 to 1623. Ed. 
Grosart, Huth Library, 1885, 5 vols.; Selections with Drayton, H. C. 
Beaching, 1899. Inedited Poems, Philobiblon Soc, 1854. 

Davies, John (of Hereford), i565?-i6i8. Microcosmus, 1603; — 
Wit's Pilgrimage, 1610-I1; The Scourge of Folly, 1611; and nine 
other poetical booklets between 1602 and 1617. The Writing School- 
master, first known ed., 1633. Collected ed, Grosart, Chertsey 
Worthies' Library, 1 878, 2 vols. 

Davies, Sir John, 1569-1626. Orchestra, 1596, 1622; Nosce 

Teipsum, 1599, and six other edd. to 1697; Epigrams, n. d.; Hymns 

"to A straea, iJ^i^. Irish tracts and legal papers, l6i2to 1656. Coll. 

ed. Grosart, Fuller Worthies' Library, 1869-76, 3 vols.; ed. Morley, 

1889. 

Davison, Francis, 1575 ?-i6i9. Poetical Rhapsady, 1602, 1611, 
1 62 1, repr. Bullen, 1890, 2 vols. 

Day, John, i 574-1 640. The Isle of Gulls, 1606^, 1633; The 
Travails of Three English Brothers, 1 607; Humor out of Breath, 
1608; Law Tricks, 1608; The Parliament of Bees, 1641; The Blind 
Beggar of Bethnal Green, 1659. Collected ed. Bullen, 1881, 2 vols. 
See also Nero and other Plays, Mermaid Series, 1888. 

Dee, Dr. John, 1527-1608. The author of seventy-nine works 
in Latin and English from A Supplication for the Preservation of 
Ancient Writers and Monuments, 1 556, to The Private Diary of Dr. 
Dee, first printed by Halliwell-Phillipps, Camden Society, 1842, and 
later in part by J. E. Bailey, 1880. 

Dekker, Thomas, 1570 .^-1641 .^ Twenty pamphlets from ~^^> 



434 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Canaan's Calamity, 1598, 1618, to Wars, Wars, Wars, 1628; chief 
among them The Wonderful Tear, The Bachelor s Banquet, both 1603; 
The Dead Term, The Bellman of London, both 1 608; Lanthorn and 
Candlelight, 1608, 1609; Four Birds of Noah's Ark, 1609, The Gulls' 
Hornbook, 1 609, repr. the King's Classics, 1895. Old Fortunatus, 
Comedy of, 1600; The Shoemakers' Holiday, 1600, six edd. to 1657; 
Satiromastix, 1602; Patient Grissel, 1 603; The Honest Whore, 1604, 
six edd. to 1635; Northward Hoe, 1607; Westward Hoe, 1607; The 
Whore of Babylon, 1607; Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1607, l6l2; If It be Not 
Good the Devil is in It, 1612; 2nd part of The Honest Whore, 1630; 
Match Me in London, 1631; The Wonder of a Kingdom, 1636. Four 
pageants, one for King James, the rest for the Lord Mayors, between 
1604 and 1629. ^^^ Percy Soc, x. Collective edd: Dramas, ed. 
Shepherd, 1873, 4 vols.; Mermaid ed. five plays, 1887. Non-dramatic 
Works, ed. Grosart, 1884, 5 vols. 

Deloney, Thomas, 1543-1600. The Gentle Craft, 1598, many 
edd. to 1696, repr. Lange, Palcestra, xviii, 1903; Thomas of Reading, 
[1599 lost], six edd. to 1636, repr. Thorns, Early English Prose Roman- 
ces, 1858. The Garland of Good Will, 1 604, eight edd. to 1664, repr. 
Percy Soc, xxx, 1853; Strange Histories, 1607, four edd. to 1681; 
John of Newberry, eighth ed. 1 619, ten others to 1672, repr. R. Sievers, 
Palcestra, xxxvi, 1 904. Broadside ballads, between 1583 and 1591. 

De Vere, Edward, see Oxford, Earl of. 

Dickenson, John, fl. 1594. The Shepherd's Complaint (in 
hexameters), n. d.; Arisbas, Euphues amidst his Slumbers, both 1594; 
Greene in Concetpt, 1598. Repr. Grosart, Occasional Issues, vi., 1878. 

Donne, John, 1573-1631. Ignatius his Conclave, Biathanatos, 
1608; Pseudo Martyr, 1610; An Anatomy of the World, 1611, 1612, 
1621, 1625; Elegy on Prince Henry, 1613; Various Sermons singly 
issued, 1623-33; Moral Sentences, 1631; His Funeral Sermon, 1632 
and other edd.; Poems, 1633, six edd. to 1669; Eighty Sermons, 1640; 
Fifty Sermons, 1 649; Essays in Divinity, 1 651; Letters to Several 
Persons, 1651, 1654; Twenty-six Sermons, 1669. Collected edd. 
Grosart, 1872, 2 vols.; ed. E. K. Chambers, The Muses' Library, 
1896, 2 vols. 

Dow.LAND, John, 1563 .''-1626 ?. The First Book of Songs, 1597, 
five edd. to 1613; The Second Book of Songs, 1600; The Third and Last 
Book of Songs, 1603; A Pilgrim's Solace, l6i2, all in Garner, Shorter 
Poems, 1903. 

Drama. See F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 1908, 2 vols., 
where a comprehensive Bibliography of the subject will be found. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 435 

See also W. W. Greg, A List of English Plays, Bibliographical Society, 
1900. 

Drant, Thomas, d. 1580. Latin verses and English sermons, 
1564 to 1574. Horace, his Art of Poetry, Epistles and Satires Eng- 
lished, 1567; parts of the Iliad unpublished. 

Drayton, Michael, 1563-1631. The Harmony of the Church, 
1591, Percy Soc, 1843, vol. vii.; Idea the Spheherd's Garland, 1593, 
1606, repr. Spenser Soc, 1891, 3rd ed. 1619, repr. Garner, Sonnets, ii, 
1904, 4th ed. 1620; Legends of Gaveston, Matilda, Robert of Normandy, 
Cromwell, each separate, 1594-1607 in several edd.; Idea's Mirror, 
1594, seven edd. to 1620, repr. Garner, Sonnets, ii, 1904, and often 
elsewhere, ed. Esdaile, with Daniel's Delia, 1908; Mortimeriados, 
1596 (repr. Collier, Roxburghe Club, 1856), altered into The Barons' 
Wars, 1603, 1605 (repr. Spenser Soc, Poems, 1888); England's 
Heroical Epistles, 1598, five other edd. variously combined to 1603; 
The Owl, 1604; Polyolbton, 1613, completed in 1622 (repr. Hooper, 
1876, 3 vols.); The Battle of Agincourt, 1627 (repr. Garnett, 1893); 
The Muses' Elizium, 1630 (repr. with Nymphidia, 1896); and nine 
other separate publications in verse. Ten collective edd. of varying 
contents between 1605 and 1637. 

The dramas of Drayton are lost, except possibly for his share in 
The Merry Devil of Edmonton, 1608, Dodsley, x; and Sir John Old- 
castle, 1600. A complete ed. of Drayton, projected by Hooper, 
gave out on the completion of Polyolbion and Hymns of the Church, 
1876, 3 vols.; Selections: by Bullen, 1883; by Garnett, The Battle of 
Agincourt, 1893; Nymphidia and The Muses' Elizium, 1896. Selec- 
tions, with Daniel, ed. Beaching, 1899. See also Elton, Introduction 
to Drayton, 1895, and Whitaker, Drayton as a Dramatist, Publ. Mod. 
Lang. Asso., 1903. 

Drummond, William (of Hawthornden), 1585-1649. Tears on 
the Death of Meliades, 1613, 1614; Poems, 1616^, 1656, 1659; Forth 
Feasting, 1617; Flowers of Sion, 1623, 1630^; The Cypress Grove, 
1623, '•^SS' Entertainment of King Charles, 1633; History of Scotland, 
1655; Works collected by Ruddiman, 171 1 ; Conversations with Ben 
Jonson, Sh. Soc, 1842. Modern ed. Turnbull, 1890; ed. W. C. Ward, 
Muses' Library, 1894, 2 vols.; see also Masson, Drummond of Haw- 
thornden, 1873. 

Dyer, Sir Edward, 1540-1607. See Hannah, Raleigh and Other 
Courtly Poets, 1875, and ed. Grosart, Fuller Worthies' Library, iv, 
1872. 

Eden, Richard, 1521 ?-I576. The Decades of the New World, 



436 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

^555' ^^^ History of Travel, 1577; and other translations of voyages 
and science. See Arber, The First Three English Books on America, 
1885. 

Edwards, Richard, 1523 ?-i566. Damon and Pithias, 1571, 
Dodsley, i; and see Miscellanies. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 1533-1603. Various translations, ed. C. 
Pemberton, Early English Text Soc, 1899; see Fliigel in Anglia, 
xiv, 1 89 1. For specimens of the queen's letters, Camden Soc, 1849. 

England's Parnassus, see Allott, Robert. 

Essay, The. See Bibliography, Cambridge History, 1910, vol. iv; 
also Littleboy, Relations between French and English Literature, 1 895; 
and Upham, French Influence in English Literature, 1 908. 

Euphuism, see C. G. Child, John Lyly and Euphuism, Miinchener 
Beitrage, vii, 1894; Bond, Works of Lyly, 1902, 3 vols.; Fuillerat, 
John Lyly, 1910. 

Every Woman in her Humor, 1609, BuUen's Old Plays, iv. 

Fair Em [n. d.], 1631; Simpson, School of Shakspere, 1878, vol. 
ii. 

Fairfax, Edward, d. 1635. Godfrey of Bulloigne, 1600, 1624, 
repr. Routledge, British Poets, 1868; Twelve Eclogues, in part first 
printed in Cooper's Muses' Library, 1737. See Anglia, xii. 

Fenton, Sir Geoffrey, 1539 ?-i6o8. Certain Tragical Dis- 
courses, 1567, repr. Tudor Translations, 2 vols., 1898; Guevara's 
Golden Epistles, 1 575, 1577, 1582; The History of Guicciardini, 
1579, and other translations. 

Fiction, Elizabethan, see Jusserand, The English Novel in the 
Reign of Elizabeth, 1895; and Bibliography in Cambridge History of 
Literature, vol. iii. 

Field, Nathaniel, i 587-1 633. A Woman is a Weathercock, 
1612; Amends for Ladies, 1618, 1639; ed. Mermaid, Nero and Other 
Plays, [n. d.]. 

FiTZGEOFFREY, Charles, fl. 1601. Affaniae (Latin epigrams), 
1601. Ed. Grosart, Occasional Issues, xvi, 1881. Also Sir Francis 
Drake, 1 596. 

Fletcher, Giles (the elder), 1549 ?-l6l i. Of the Russe Common- 
wealth, 1591, Hakluyt Soc, ed. E. A. Bond, 1856; Licia and The 
Rising to the Crown of Richard III, 1593, repr. Grosart, Fuller 
Worthies' Miscellanies, iii, 1872; Licia also in Garner, Sonnets, ii. 

Fletcher, Giles (the younger), 1 588-1 623. Christ's Victory and 
Triumph, 1610, 1632, 1640. Ed. Grosart, Early English Poets, 
1876; ed. W. T. Brooke, n. d. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 437 

Fletcher, John, i 579-1 625 (including plays with Beaumont). 
^he Woman Hater, 1 607 2, 1648, 1649; ^^^ Faithful Shepherdess, n. 
d., five add. to 1665; The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 1613, 1635^; 
Cupid's Revenge, 1615, 1630, 1635; The Scornful Lady, 1616, seven 
edd. to 1651; The Maid's Tragedy, 1619, seven edd. to 1661; King 
and No King, 1619, seven edd. to 1661; Philaster, 1620, seven edd. 
to 1652; Thierry and Theodoret, 1621, 1648, 1649; ^^^ ^'"^0 Noble 
Kinsmen (with Shakespeare?) 1634; The Elder Brother, 1637^, ^^^ 
edd. to 1661; The Bloody Brother, 1639, 1640; Monsieur Thomas, 
1639; fFit Without Money, 1639, 1661; The Night Walker, 1640, 
1661; Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, 1640; Beggars' Bush, 1641^; 
The Wild goose Chase, 1652 (foho form). Collected edd. First folio, 
1647, contains thirty-four other plays; the following are mentioned in 
the text: The Woman's Prize, The Coxcomb, The Captain, Love's 
Cure, Wit at Several Weapons, The Chances, Bonduca, Valentinian. 
Second folio, 1679, reprints all the plays of the first folio and all of the 
quartos just enumerated except Beggar's Bush; it adds The Coronation 
from the quarto of 1640, a play later claimed by Shirley. Third 
folio (repr. of the second), 171 1. Critical edd. begin with Theobald 
and others, 1750, 10 vols.; and continue to Weber, 1812, 14 vols.; 
and Dyce, 1843-46, ii vols. Recent edd. are that of A. Glover, 
Cambridge English Classics, 1905, 10 vols, to date; and the Variorum 
Ed. by various scholars (BuUen), also 1905 and not yet completed^ 
Barnavelt was first printed by Bullen, Old English Plays, ii, 1883. 

Fletcher, Phineas, 1582-1650. Locustae, 1627; Britain's Ida, 
1628; Sicelides, 1631; The Purple Island, Piscatory Eclogues, Mis- 
cellanies, etc., 1633; other lesser books. Poems, ed. Grosart, Fuller 
Worthies' Miscellanies, 1869, 4 vols. 

Florio, John, i 553-1 625. Italian and English Dictionary, 
\^()Z; Montaigne's Essays Englished, 1603,1613, repr. J. H.Mc Carthy, 
1889. Ed. Saintsbury, Tudor Translations, 1892-93. Other works 
between 1578 and 1603. 

Ford, Emanuel, fl. 1607. Parismus, 1598, 2nd part, 1599, many 
subsequent edd.; Ornatus and Artesia, 1607 ^^^ other (^dA.;Montelion, 
earlier edd. lost, 1633, and later edd. See Dunlop, History of Fiction^ 
1814. 

FoRMAN, Dr. Simon, 1552-1611. Diary, Camden Society, 1843. 
The parts relating to Shakespeare were first reprinted by Collier, 
New Particulars, etc., 1836. 

Fortescue, Thomas, fl. 1570. The Forest or Collection of His- 
tories, I ^y I. Not reprinted. 



438 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

FoxE, John, 1516-1587. Acts and Monuments (Book of Martyrs), 
1562, and eight other edd. to 1684. Earlier Latin edd. Strassburg, 
1554; Basel, 1 559-1 562. Ed. Stoughton, 1 877, 8 vols. Christus 
Triumphans, 1556, five later edd. to 1677. 

Fraunce, Abraham, fl. 1 587-1633. Tasso-Watson, Aminta, 
transl. 1587; The Arcadian Rhetoric, 1588; The Lawyer s Logic, 1588; 
The Countess of Pembroke's Emanuel, 1591; repr. Grosart, Fuller 
Worthies' Miscellanies, iii. 1871; The Countess of Pembroke's Ivy- 
church, 1591-92; and other works. 

Gager, William, fl. 1580-1619. Ulysses Redux, Meleager, both 
1592. Other works not printed. 

Gascoigne, George, 1525 ?-i577. A Hundreth Sundry Flowers, 
1572; The Posies of G., 1575; The Whole Works, 1587. These contain 
The Steel Glass, separately published, 1576, repr. Arber, English 
Reprints, 1868; the plays, Supposes, Jocasta, The Glass of Government, 
1575; The Adventures of Master F. /. 1572; and Certain Notes of In- 
struction; besides other tracts. Ed. CunlifFe, Cambridge English 
Classics, 1907-9, 2 vols. See also Schelling, Life and Writings of G., 
1893. 

GiFFORD, Humphrey, fl. 1580. A Posie of Gilliflowers, 1580; 
ed. Grosart, Occasional Issues, 1875. 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 1539 ?-i583. Discourse of a New 
Passage to Cataia, edited by Gascoigne, 1576; Queen Elizabeth's 
Academy, pr. E. E. Text Soc, 1869. 

GoLDiNG, Arthur, 1536 ?-i 605?. Seneca de Beneficiis, 1558; 
Aretino's History of the Goths in Italy, 1 563; Caesar, transl. 1565; 
Ovid's Metamorphosis, 1 565, 1 567, repr. The King's Library, ed. 
Rouse, 1904. 

GooGE, Barnabe, 1540-1594. Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets, 
1563; ed. Arber, Reprints, 1871. Various translations, 1560 to 1579. 

GossoN, Setphen, 1555-1624. The School of Abuse, 1579, 1587, 
repr. Arber, Reprints, 1868; Ephimerides of Phialo, 1579, 1586; 
Plays Confuted, 1582; Pleasant Quips for Upstart New-Fangled 
Gentlewomen, 1 595. 

GouGH, Henry, fl. 1570. Offspring of the House of the Otto- 
mans, 1570. 

Grafton, Richard, fl. 1543-1595. Besides edd. of Harding's 
and of Hall's Chronicles, 1543 and 1548, in which Grafton was printer 
and reviser; Abridgment of Chronicles, 1562, five edd. to 1572; 
Chronicle at Large of England, 1586-69, 2 vols., two edd. Manual of 
English History, 1 595. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 439 

Greene, Robert, 1560 ?-i592. Thirty pamphlets between 
Mamillia, [1580], 1583; and Greene's Vision, 1592, chief among them 
Planetomachta, 1585; Euphues his Censure to Philautus, 1587; 
Penelope's Weh, 1587; Perimedes, 1588; Pandosto, 1588, ed. P. G, 
Thomas, Shakespeare Classics, 1907; Menaphon, 1589; The Spanish 
Masquerado, 1589; The Mourning Garment, 1590, 1616; Farewell to 
Folly, 1591, 1617; Philomela, 1592, 1631; A Quip for an Upstart 
Courtier, 1592^, 1 606, 1 620, 1635; the Conycatching tracts, 1592. 
The Black Book's Messenger, 1592, A Groatsworth of Wit, 1592, 
eight edd. to 1637, repr. Saintsbury, Elizabethan and Jacobean 
Pamphlets, 1902; Greene's Repentance, 1592. 

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 1594, four edd. to 1655; ^^- ^- ^• 
Ward, with Faustus, 1892; Orlando Furioso, 1594, 1599; Selimus, 
1594, 1638, both in Malone Soc, 1907, 1908; James IF, 1598; Al- 
phonsus of Ar agon, 1 599; George a Greene, 1599, doubtfully accepted 
as by G. Life and Complete Works, ed. Grosart, Huth Library, 1881- 
86, 15 vols.; Plays and Poems, ed. J. C. Collins, 1905, 2 vols.; 
Dramas, ed. Dickinson, Mermaid Series, 1909. 

Greville, Sir Fulke (Lord Brooke), 1554-1628. Mustapha, 
1609, Certain Learned and Elegant Works, 1633; -'^'/^ 0/ Sidney, 
1652; repr. ed. Brydges, 1816, 2 vols.; also by N. Smith, 1907. Re- 
mains, 1670. Collective ed. Grosart, 1870, 4 vols. 

Griffin, Bartholomew, d. 1602. Fidessa, 1596, Garner, 
Sonnets, ii. 

Grtm the Collier of Croydon, GratiaeTheatrales, 1662, Dodsley, viii. 

Grimald, Nicholas, 1519-1562. See Miscellanies. 

Grimestone, Edward, fl. 1610. General Inventory of the His- 
tory of France, 1607; History of the Netherlands, 1608; History of 
Spain, 1612; and other like works, none reprinted. See Boas in 
Modern Philology, iii, 1905. 

Grove, Matthew, fl. 1587, Pelops and Hippodamia, Epigrams, 
Songs and Sonnets, 1587. Repr. Grosart, Occasional Issues, 1878. 

GuiLPiN, Edward, fl. 1598. Skialetheia, 1598, repr. Collier 
Miscellaneous Tracts, 1868; and Grosart, Occasional Issues, 1878. 

GwiNNE, Matthew, 1558 }-i62j. Nero, 1603, 1639; Fertumnus, 
1607; other works, J. Ward, Lives of Gresham Professors, 1740. 

Hake, Edward, fl. 1579. News Out of Paul's Churchyard, 
1568, 1579, Isham Reprints, 1872; many devotional and commenda- 
tory works. 

Hakluyt, Richard, I552.?-i6i6. Divers Foyages Touching 
America, 1 582, ed. J. W. Jones, Hakluyt Soc, 1 850; Four Foyages 



440 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

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Virginia Richly Valued, 1609, ed. Rye, W. B., 1851; Discourse con- 
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Hall, Arthur, 1540 i*-l 604. Ten Books of Homer's Iliad, 1581. 

Hall, Joseph, 1574-1656. Virgidemiarum Six Books, 1597- 
98, 1599, 1602; Mundus Alter et Idem, 1605, 1607, transl. by Healey 
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Library, 1885; Characters of Virtues and Vices, 1608; Epistles, 1608, 
2 vols.; Contemplations on Scriptures, 1612-1626, 6 vols. Works, ed. 
Wynter, 1863, 10 vols.; Poems, ed, Grosart, 1879; Satires, ed. S. W. 
Singer, The Muses' Library, 1907. 

Hannay, Patrick, d. 1629. Epigrammaton Centuriae Sex, 
1616; other later verses. Collective ed., 1622, repr. Hunterian Club, 
1875. 

Harbert, William, fl. 1604. J Prophecy of Cadwallader, 1604. 
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Harington, Sir John, 1561-1612. Orlando Furioso, transl. 
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1634. Various political and other tracts, most important a View of 
Ireland in 1605, ed. Macray, 1879; Nugae Antiquae, 1769-75, ed. 
Park, 1804. 

Harman, Thomas, fl. 1567. A Caveat for Common Cursetors, 
1566 (lost), 1567, Repr. New Sh. Soc, 1880, and The Shakespeare 
Library, 1907. 

Harrison, William, i 534-1 593. Description of England, pre- 
fixed to Holinshed's Chronicles, 1577, 1 587; ed. Furnivall, New Sh. 
Soc, 1 877-1 88 1. Abridgement, Camelot Series, n. d. 

Harvey, Gabriel, i545?-i630. Various Letters, 1580, 1592, 
1593; Pierce's Supererogation, 1593; The Trimming of Thomas 
Nash, 1597. Latin works, 1577-78. Collected ed. Grosart, Huth 
Library, 1 884-85, 3 vols. 

Haughton, William, fl. 1598. A Woman will Have her Will, 
1 616, 1626, 1 63 1, otherwise called Englishmen for my Money, Dodsley, 
X. 

Hayward, Sir John, 1564-1627. History of Henry IV, 1599; 
Union of England and Scotland, 1604; Lives of Three Norman Kings, 
1613; Sanctuary of a Troubled Soul, 1616, many edd.; other devotional 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 441 

pamphlets; Edward VI, 1630, 1636; Beginning of the Reign of Eliza- 
beth, 1636 (Camden Society, repr. 1840); History of Henry HI and 
IF, with Cotton, 1642. 

Henslowe, Philip, d. 1616. Henslowe's Diary, ed. Collier, Sh. 
Soc, 1845 (unsafe); ed. Greg, 1 904-1 908, 2 vols, (authoritative). 

Heywood, Jasper, i 535-1 598, See Seneca Translated. 

HEYVi^ooD, Thomas, 1575 ?-i650. Edward IF, 1600, five edd. to 
1626; // Tou Know Not Me, 1605, eight edd. to 1623; J Woman 
Killed with Kindness, 1607, 1 61 7; The Fair Maid of the Exchange, 
1607, three edd. to 1637; ^^^ Rape of Lucrece, 1608, four edd. to 
1638; The Golden Age, l6li; The Silver Age, 1613; The Brazen Age, 
1613; The Four Prentices of London, 1615, 167,2; The Fair Maid of the 
West, 1 631; The Iron Age, 1632; The English Traveller, 1 633; 
The Lancashire Witches, 1634; A Maidenhead Well Lost, 1634; 
Love's Mistress, 1636, 1640; A Challenge for Beauty, 1636; Royal 
King and Loyal Subject, 1637; The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, 1638; 
Fortune by Land and Sea, 1655; The Captives, Bullen, Old Plays, iv, 
1883. 

Troia Britannica, 1609; An Apology for Actors, i6l2, repr. 
Sh. Soc, 1841; Gunaikaton, 1624; England's Elizabeth, 1632; The 
Hierarchy of Blessed Angels, 1 635; Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas, 
1637; The General History of Women, 1657. Elegies, Epithalamia, 
six city Pageants (for which see Percy Society, x, 1843), additional 
translations and pamphlets. Dramatic Works, ed. Pearson, 1874, 6 
vols. 

HiGGlNS, John, I 545-1 602. See Mirror for Magistrates. 

Htstriomastix, 1610, probably by Marston, School of Shakspere, 
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HoBY, Sir Thomas, i 530-1 566. The Courtier of Count Baldessar 
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HOLINSHED, Ralph, d. 1580 ?. Chronicles of England, Scotland, 
and Ireland, 1577, 1586-87. Repr. 1807-08, 6 vols. See also Bos- 
well-Stone, Shakespeare's Holinshed, 1896. 

Holland, Philemon, 1552-1637. Livy's Roman History, 1600; 
Pliny's History of the World, 1601 ; Plutarch's Morals, 1603; Suetonius, 
Twelve Caesars, 1606, repr. Tudor Translations, ed. Whibley, 1899; 
Marcellinus, Roman History, 1609; Camden's Britannia, Englished, 
1610; Xenophon's Cyropaedia, 1632. 

Holyday, Barten, 1593-1661. Persius' Satires, translated, 1616, 
1617, 1635, 1673; Technogamia, a comedy, 1618, 1630; and other 
later works. 



442 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Hooker, Richard, i 554-1 600. Ecclesiastical Polity, four books, 
1594. 1604; Book V, 161 1, 1617; Books VI, VIII, 1648, 1651; Book 
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Hopkins, Richard, d. 1594?. Granada's Prayer and Medita- 
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1599, 1612, 1625. 

Howell, Thomas, fl. 1568. New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets, 
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Grosart, Occasional Issues, viii. 

Hughes, Thomas, fl. 1587. The Misfortunes of Arthur, 1587, ed. 
Grumbine, 1900. 

Hume, Tobias, d. 1645. •^""j/ Part of Airs, 1605; Captain 
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HuNNis, William, fl. 1 530-1 597. A Hive full of Hunney, 1578; 
Seven Sobs, 1 583; Hunnis' Recreations, 1 588. See Slopes, in Sh. 
Jahrbuch, xxvii, and repr. 1892 for an account of Hunnis. 

Jack Drum's Entertainment, 1601, School of Shakspere, 1878. 

James I, King, i 566-1 625. Essays of a Prentice, 1584, repr. 
Arber, Reprints, 1869; Demonology, lS97'y Basilikon Doron, 1599; 
True Law of free Monarchies, 1603; A Counterblast to Tobacco, 1604; 
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1689; a convenient ed. of extracts by Rait, A Royal Rhetorician, 1900. 

J. C, Alcilia, Parthenophen's Loving Folly, 1595. Repr. W. 
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Jewell, John (Bishop of Salisbury) 1522-1571. Works, 1609. 
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John, The Troublesome Reign of King, 1591. Ed. Furnival, 
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Johnson, Richard, 1573-1659 ?. The Nine Worthies of London, 
1592; The Seven Champions of Christendom, 1596-97, fourteen edd. 
to 1690; A Crown Garland of Golden Roses, 1 61 2, seven edd. to 1685, 
repr. Percy Soc, vi, 1842; Walks in Moorfields, 1607; Look on Me, 
London, 1613; both repr. in Collier, Early English Popular Poetry, 
vol. ii, 1864; Tom Thumb, 1621; Tom a Lincoln, 1631, twelve edd. to 
1682. Several other like pamphlets. 

Jones, Robert, d. 1616. Book of Songs, 1601; First Set of Madri- 
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JoNSON, Ben, 1573-1635. Every Man Out of his Humor, 1600^; 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 443 

Cynthia's Revels, i6oi; Every Man in his Humor, l6oi; Poetaster, 
1602; Sejanus, 1605; Eastward Hoe (with Chapman and Marston), 
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1635; The Alchemist, l6l2; The Silent Woman, l6l2 ?, 1620. (All 
in folio 161 6 except The Case is Altered.) 

King James' Entertainment, 1604; Hymencei, 1606; The Viscount 
Haddington's Masque, 1608; The Queen's Masques \of Blackness and 
of Beauty'^, 1609, The Masque of Queens, 1609; Love Freed from Ignor- 
ance, 161 2 ?; Oberon, Love Restored, Mercury Vindicated, The Golden 
Age, znd three other pieces, folio 1616. Epigrams, The Forest, both 
folio 1 61 6. 

The New Inn, 1629, ^^3^ > Bartholomew Fair, four other comedies, 
The Sad Shepherd, folio 1640; The Masque of Lethe, 1617; Neptune's 
Triumph, 1623; ^^^ Fortunate Isles, [n. d.]; Chloridia, 1630?; 
Love's Triumph, 1630; these and twelve other masques and enter- 
tainments, folio 1640; Execration upon Vulcan and Divers Epigrams, 
quarto, 1640; Horace Art of Poetry, The Masque of Gipsies, and 
Epigrams, octavo, 1640; Discoveries, English Grammar, folio 1640 
with contents of folio 161 6. Leges Convivales, in third folio, 1692, 
with all the foregoing. Modern collective edd., Gifford, 1816, 9 
vols.; Cunningham-GifFord, 1875, 9 vols; Mermaid, ed., n. d. 3 vols, 
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M. Castelain, Ben Jonson, 1909. 

Knolles, Richard, 1550-1610. General History of the Otto- 
man Turks, 1603. 

Kyd, Thomas, 1557 ?-i595. Soliman and Perseda [1593 ?], 1599'; 
Spanish Tragedy, 1592 .'' twelve quartos to 1633, repr. ed. Schick, 
Archive, xc, and Temple Dramatists, iSgS; Cornelia, 1594, 1595; The 
First Part of Jeronimo, 1605, i^ "O* ^Y Kyd. Three pamphlets 
between 1588 and 1592. Collective ed. Boas, 1901. 

Larum for London, A, l6l2, Simpson. School of Shakspere, 1872. 

Legge, Thomas, 1595-1607. Richardus Tertius, Sh. Soc, 1844. 

Leir, The History of King, 1 605, repr. Malone Society, 1907; 
also Shakespeare Classics, ed. S. Lee, 1907. 

LiTHGOW, William, i 582-1 645. A Total Discourse of the Rare 
Adventures and Painful Perigrinations, 1614, complete in 1632. 

Locrine, The Tragedy of, 1 595, repr. Malone Society, 1908. See 
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Lodge, Thomas, 1558-1625. Defense of Poetry and Stage Plays, 
1579, repr. Sh. Soc, 1853; An Alarum for Usurers, 1 584, repr. in the 
same; Rosalynd, 1590 and eight other edd. to 1642, often repr'd., ed. 



44+ BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Greg, Shakespeare Classics, 1907, and sixteen other romances, trans- 
lations, and moral tracts including A Margaret of America, and Wit's 
Misery, both 1 596; A Treatise on the Plague, 1603; The Works of 
Seneca, 1614; and A Summary upon Du Bartas, 1 62 1. S cilice's 
Metamorphosis, 1589, 1610; repr. Chiswick Press, 1819; Phillis, 
1593, Garner Sonnets, ii; A Fig for Momus, 1595. Repr. Auchinleck 
Press, 1817. The Wounds of Civil War, 1594, Dodsley, vii; A Look- 
ing-glass for London, 1594, 1598, 1602, 1617. Works, ed. Gosse 
(exclusive of the plays), Hunterian Club, 1872-82. 

LoK, Henry, fl. 1593-1597. Ecclesiastes, whereunto are annexed 
sundry Sonnets of Christian Passions, ed. Grosart, Fuller Worthies' 
Library, 1 87 1. 

London Prodigal, 1605, Tyrrel, Doubtful Plays of Shakespeare. 
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Lust's Dominion," hyyiarlowe," 1657. Ed. Pickering, Mar/ow^, 
1826, iii. 

Lyly, John, 1553-4 — 1606. Euphues, isjg^ and twelve other 
edd. to 1636; Euphues and his England, 1580^, and eleven edd. to 
1636. Repr. Arber, 1868. Cam pas pe, 1584^, 1591 ; Sapho and Phao, 
1584, 1591; Endimion, 1591; Gallathea, 1592; Midas, 1592; Mother 
Bomhie, 1594, 1598; The Woman in the Moon, 1 597; The Maid's 
Metamorphosis, 1 600; Love's Metamorphosis, 1 60 1. Pap with a 
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Court Comedies, 1632; ed. Fairholt, 1858, 2 vols.; complete Works, 
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1910. 

Lynche, Richard, fl. 1596-1601. Diella, Certain Sonnets, 1596, 
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Lyrics, Elizabethan. Lyrical Poems, Percy Society, xiii, 1844; 
Arber, English Garner, 1879-83, 8 vols.; Bullen, Lyrics from Song 
Books, 1887, More Lyrics from Song Books, 1888, Lyrics from the 
Dramatists, 1889-90, Lyrics from Romances, 1890, Garner, Shorter 
Elizabethan Poems, 1903; Schelling, Book of Elizabethan Lyrics, 1895; 
F. I. Carpenter, English Lyrical Poetry, 1906. 

Machin, Lev^^is, fl. 1607. Eclogues with Barkstead's Mirrha, 
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Madrigal. See F. A. Cox, English Madrigals in the Time of 
Shakespeare, 1899. Also T. Oliphant, Musa Madrigalesca, 1837, 
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Manningham, John, d. 1622. Diary, ed. Bruce, Camden 
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 445 

Markham, Gervais, 1568-1637. Ariosto's Satires, 1608, 1611; 
thirty or more pamphlets on horsemanship, husbandry, angling, 
archery, the art of letter-writing, and other subjects between 1593 and 
1654. Repr. Tears of the Beloved, 1600; Marie Magdalene's Tears, 
1601, ed. Grosart, Fuller Worthies' Library, 1871. 

Marlowe, Christopher, 1564-1593. Tamburlaine, 1590, 1592, 
1605, 1606; Edward II, 1594, four quartos to 1622; Dido (with Nash) 
1594; Hero and Leander, 1598^, seven edd. to 1637; Lucan's Pharsalia 
(Book I), 1600; Ovid's Amores, 3 edd. n. d. ; Massacre at Paris, 
1600?; Faustus, 1604 (first extant quarto) and seven other edd. to 
1631 ; The Jew of Malta, 1633 (first extant quarto). Lust's Dominion, 
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Marston, John, 1576-1634. Pigmalion's Image, 1598, 1613, 
1638; The Scourge of Villainy, 1598, 1599^. Antonio and Mellida, 
1602; The Malcontent, 1604^; The Dutch Courtezan, 1605; The Fawn, 
1606^; Sophonisha, 1606; What Tou Will, 1607; The Insatiate Count- 
ess, 1613, 1616, 1631; one or two other plays doubtfully his, and two 
imsques.Tragedtes and Comedies, 16^^. Works, ed. Bullen, 1887, 3 vols. 

Martin Marprelate Controversy, 1 587-1 590. Preliminary works : 
A Defence of the Government, by Bridges, 1 587; Diotrephes, by J. 
Udall; The Demonstration of Discipline, anon, (both Puritan replies), 
1588. Puritan tracts: The Epistle; The Epitome; A Supplication to 
Parliament, by Penry; Hay any Work for Cooper; The Protestation; 
with others, in all nine tracts, all 1589. Church pamphlets; An 
Admonition, etc., by T. Cooper; Mar-Martin; Anti-Martinus; Pas- 
quil of England; Martin's Month's Mind; Pap with a Hatchet; An 
Almond for a Parrot; with other tracts, in all some eighteen, all 1589 or 
early in 1590. Bacon, Controversies of the Church, 1587. On the 
topic see Arber, "Introductory Sketch to the M. M. Controversy," 
English Scholars' Library, viii, ix, xi, xv, wherein several of the 
tracts are reprinted. See also W. Pierce, An Historical Introduc- 
tion to the Marprelate Tract, 1908; and Bibliography in Cambridge 
History of Literature, 1909, vol. iii. 

Masque, H. A. Evans, English Masques, 1897; R. Brotanek, Z)i^ 
englischen Maskenspiele, Wiener Beitrdge, 1902; P. Reyher, Le 
Masque Anglais, 1909; see also W. W. Greg, A List of Masques, etc., 
1902. 

Melbancke, Brian, fl. 1583. Philotimus, the War betwixt 
Nature and Fortune, 1583. See Brydges, British Bibliographer, ii. 



446 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Melville, James, 1556-1614. Diary, pr. for the Bannatyne 
Club, 1829. 

Melville, Sir James, 1535-1617. Memoirs of his own Life^ 
1683; repr, for the Bannatyne Club, 1827. 

Meres, Francis, i 565-1 647. Palladis Tamia, Wit's Treasury, 
1598, 1634. Repr. in part. New Sh. Soc, 1874. Also certain religious 
works. 

Merry Devil of Edmonton, 1608, five edd. to 1655. See Dray- 
ton. 

Microcynicon, Six Snarling Satyres, by T. M. Gent, 1599. (Not 
by Middleton.) 

MiDDLETON, Thomas, i 570-1 627. The Wisdom of Solomon 
Paraphrased, 1597; Blurt, Master Constable, l6o2; Michaelmas Term, 
1607, 1630; Tour Five Gallants, 1 607 ?; The Phoentx, 1 607, 1630; 
The Family of Love, 1 608; A Trick to Catch the Old One, 1 608 2, 
1 61 6; A Mad World my Masters, 1608, 1640; The Roaring Girl, 
1611; A Fair Quarrel, 1617^, 1622; The Inner Temple Masque, 1619-, 
The World Well Tossed at Tennis, 1620; A Game at Chess, 1625*; 
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 1630; The Changeling, 1653, 1668; 
The Spanish Gipsy, 1653; Two New Plays: More Dissemblers Besides 
Women, Women Beware Women, 1657; No Wit, No Help like a 
Woman's, 1657; The Mayor of Queenborough, 1661; Anything for a 
Quiet Life, 1662; The Witch, first pr. 1778 by Reed; eight pageants 
between 1613 and 1626. See Percy Society, x; and several pamphlets. 
Works, ed. Dyce, 1840, 5 vols.; Bullen, 1885, 8 vols. 

Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Baldwin, 1559, 1 563 (Sackville's 
work first included), 1571, 1574, 1575, 1578; The First Part of the M. 
for M., ed. Higgins, 1574, 1575; The Second Part of the M. for M., ed. 
Blennerhasset, 1578; The M. for M. "with the addition of divers 
tragedies," ed. Newton, 1587; M. for M. "newly enlarged," ed. 
Niccols, 1610. Repr. Haslewood, 1815, 3 vols. 

Miscellanies (Lyrical). TotteVs Miscellany (Songs and Sonnets 
by Wyatt, Surrey, and others, ed. Grimald), 1557, seven edd. to 1587, 
repr. Arber, 1870; The Paradise of Dainty Devices, ed. Edwards, 
1576, eight edd. to 1600, repr. Brydges, British Bibliographer, iii, 
1810; A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions, ed. Proctor, I57^> 
repr. Park, Heliconia, i, 1815; A Handful of Pleasant Delights, ed. 
Robinson, 1584, repr. Arber, English Scholar's Library, iii, 1878; 
The Phoenix Nest, editor R. S. (unknown) 1593, repr. Heliconia, ii; 
England's Helicon, ed. Bodenham, 1600, 1614, repr. Bullen, 1887; 
A Poetical Rhapsody, ed. Davison, 1602, 161 1, 1621, repr. Bullen, 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 447 

1890, 2 vols. Collective ed. Collier, Seven English Miscellanies, 
1867, includes all of these but ^ Handful of Pleasant Delights. 

More, Sir Thomas, Chronicle History of, first published by Dyce, 
Sh, Soc, 1844 ed. Brooke, Shakespeare yipocrypha, 1908. 

MoRLEY, Thomas, fl. 1594. Canzonets, 1593; Madrigals, 1594, 
1600, 1601; The First Book of Ballets, 1595, and ten other like works 
to The Triumphs of Oriana, 1601, repr. Garner, Shorter Poems, 1903. 

MoRYSON, Fynes, 1566-1616. An Itinerary Containing Ten 
Tears' Travel, 1617. Ed. Hughes, as Shakespeare's Europe^ 1903; 
also in part (as to Ireland) in 1735 and by Morley, Carishrook Library, 
1890. 

Mucedorus, A Most Pleasant Comedy of, 1 598, sixteen edd. to 
1668. Dodsley, vii. 

MuLCASTER, Richard, I530?-i6ii. Positions for the Training 
up of Children, 1581; Elementary of the Right Writing of the English 
Tongue, 1582; Catechismus Paulinus, 1599. See Quick, R. M. and 
his Elementary, 1893; Klackr, Lehen und Werke R. M.'s, 1 893. 

Munday, Anthony, i 553-1 633. A score of pamphlets, tracts, 
and broadsides verse and prose from 1577 to i6ix, chief among them 
The Mirror of Mutability, 1579; Sundry Examples, 1580; The Taking 
of Campion, 1 58 1, etc. M.'s principle stories and romances trans- 
lated are, Zelauto, 1580; Paladino of England, 1588; Palmarin d'Oliva, 
1588-1597; Palmendos, 1589, 1653; Amadis de Gaule, 1589-1619; 
Gerileon of England, 1592; Sir John Oldcastle, 1600 (vpith others); 
The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, 1601, 
repr. Dodsley, viii; Palmerin of England, 1602, five edd. to 1664; 
Primaleon of Greece, 1619, (lost ed. 1595); John a Kent, a play, pr. 
Sh. Soc, 1851. Civic pageants, eight between 1605 and 1623^ see 
Percy Soc. Publ., x. 

Narcissus, a Twelfth Night Merriment, ed. M. L. Lee, 1893. 

Nash, Thomas, 1567-1601. The Anatomy of Absurdity, 1589, 
1590; A Countercuff to Martin Junior, Martins Month's Mind, 
The Return of Pasquil of England, 1589; Pasquil's Apology, 1590, 
these four Marprelate Tracts; Astrological Prognostications, 1591; 
Pierce Penniless, Four Letters Confuted, both 1592, the last repr. 1593; 
Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, 1 593, 1594, 1 61 3; The Terrors of the 
Night, 1594; The Unfortunate Traveler or Jack Wilton, 1 594, repi. 
ed. Gosse, 1892; The Tragedy of Dido, 1594 (pr. in edd. of Marlowe); 
Have With Tou to Saffron- Walden, 1596; Lenten Stuff, 1600; Summer's 
Last Will, 1600, Dodsley J viii. Collective ed. Grosart, Huih Library, 
1883-85, 6 vols.; McKerrow, 1904-08, 4 vols. Several of Nash's 



448 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

tracts were reprinted by Collier in his Reprints, Temp. Eliz. and Jac. 
I; see also Selections from Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith, 
1904. 

Naunton, Sir Robert, 1563-1635. Fragmenta Regalia, 1641, 
ed. Arber, Reprints, 1870. 

Nevile, Alexander, 1544-1614. See Seneca Translated. 

NiccoLS, Richard, fl. 1610. See Mirror for Magistrates. 

North, Sir Thomas, 1535 ?-i6oo ?. The Dial of Princes, 1557; 
Philosophy of Doni, 1^70, 1601, ed. Jacobs, Earliest English Version 
of the Fables of Bidpai, 1888; The Lives of the Noble Grecians and 
Romans, by Plutarch, 1597, eight edd. to 1676. Modern ed., Tudor 
Translations, 1895; also Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. Skeat, 1875. 

NoRTHBROOKE, JoHN, fl. 1570. A Treatise wherein Dicing, 
Dancing and Vain Plays are Reproved, ISJJ, 1579. Sh. Soc, 1843. 

Norton, Thomas, 1532-1584. See Sackville. 

NucE, Thomas, d. 1617. See Seneca Translated. 

Oldcastle, Sir John, The first part of, see Pseudo-Shakespeare. 

OvERBURY, Sir Thomas, 1581-1613. The Character of a Wife, 
1614; Characters with a Wife "now a Widow," 1614, 1615* 1616^, 
sixteen edd. to 1638, repr. Carisbrook Library, 1891; Works, ed. 
Rimbault, 1856. 

Owen, John, d. 1622. Epigrams in Latin, four edd., each 
adding to the last between 1606 and 1613. Collected 1624 ^nd often 
after; Englished, 1619, and six edd. to 1678 by various hands; transl. 
French, German, and Spanish. 

Oxford, Earl of, Edward de Vere, 1550-1604. Verse con- 
tributed mostly to contemporary anthologies. Collected by Grosart, 
Fuller Worthies' Library, 1 872. 

Painter, William, fl. 1537. The Palace of Pleasure, 1566, 1569, 
1575; "the second time," 1567, 1575. Ed. Jacobs, 1890, 3 vols. 

Parker, Matthew (Archbishop of Canterbury), 1 504-1 575. 
For Bibliography see D. N. B., xliii. 

Parnassus Plays, The. The Pilgrimage to Parnassus; I, Return 
Return from Parnassus; 2, Return from Parnassus, 1606. All in ed. 
W. D. Macray, 1886, the first two there for the first time printed. 

Parsons, Robert, 1546-1610. For the thirty-two items of his 
controversial writings between 1580 and 1612 see D. N. B., xliii. 
P.'s most popular work was J Christian Directory, 1582, 1585, and 
other edd. Leicester's Commonwealth, 1584, 1641^, 1661, was re- 
pudiated by him as not his. 

Pastor Fido, II, of Guarini, translated, "by a kinsman of Sir 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 449 

Edward Dymocke," 1602. See W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and 
Pastoral Drama, 1906, p. 242. 

Pastoral, The. See especially W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and 
Pastoral Drama, 1906; and the collection of English Pastorals, by 
E. K. Chambers, 1895. 

Pedantius, see Wingfield. 

Peele, George, 1552 ?-i598 ?. The Arraignment of Paris, 1584; 
Edward I, 1593, 1599; Battle of Alcazar, 1594, repr. Malone Soc, 
1906; The Old Wives Tale, 1595, repr. by the same 1908, David and 
Bethsabe, 1 599. Eight or more pageants and pieces of occasional 
verse between 1585 and 1592. Merry Conceited Jests, 1607, sixedd. 
to 1671. Collective ed. Bullen, 1888, 2 vols. 

Pembroke, Mary, Countess of, I555?-i62i. A Discourse of 
Life and Death, 1592, 1600; Garnier's Antonie, 1592, ed. Luce, 
Litterar-htstorische Forschungen, iii, 1897. 

Penry, John, fl. 1587. See Marprelate Controversy. 

Percy, William, d. 1648. Coelia, 1594; repr. Garner, Sonnets, 
1904, ii; Four plays, ed. Lloyd, for Roxburghe Club, 1824, 2 vols. 

Pettie, George, i 548-1 589. Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, 
lS7^f fi'^e edd. to 1613. Ed. Gollancz, 1908. 

Phaer, Thomas, d. 1560. Seven Books of the Mneid, 1 558; 
Nine Books, 1562; 1573 (completed by Twyne to twelve books); 
1583; six further edd. to 1620. 

Playhouse, see Stage. 

Porter, Henry, fl. 1600. The Two Angry Women of Abington, 
1599^, Dodsley, vii. And see Gayley, Representative Comedies, 1903. 

Preston, Thomas, fl. 1560. Cambises, 1570?, 1585? Repr. 
Manly, Specimens, ii, 1897. 

Proctor, Thomas. See Miscellanies. 

Proteus and the Rock Adamantine, Masque of, Gesta Grayorum, 
1688, repr. Nichols' Progresses of Elizabeth, ii. 

Pseudo-Shakespeare. Locrine, The Lamentable Tragedy of, 
1595; Sir John Oldcastle, 1600^; Cromwell, The Chronicle History of 
Thomas Lord, 1602, 1 61 3; The London Prodigal, 1 605; The Puritan 
or the Widow of Watling Street, 1 607; A Yorkshire Tragedy, 1608, 
1619; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 1609^, eight edd. to 1635; all of these 
plays were added to Shakespeare's in the third folio 1664, and re- 
printed in the fourth, 1685. See R. Sachs, in Sh. Jahrbuch, xxvii, 
1892; and A. F. Hopkinson, Shakespeare's Doubtful Plays, 1890-95; 
also Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke, 1908, who 
reprints them. 



450 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Pulpit, The English. See Bibliography Cambridge History of 
Literature, 1910, vol. iv. 

Purchase, Samuel, I575?-i626, Purchase his Pilgrimage, 
1613, 1614, 1617, 1626. Purchase his Pilgrim, 1619; Hakluytus 
Posthumus or Purchase his Pilgrims, 1625, repr. Glasgow, 1905, 20 
vols. 

Puritan, The, 1 607. See Pseudo-Shakespeare. 

Puritan Attack on the Stage. Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein 
Dancing and Vain Plays are Reproved, 1577; Gosson, The School of 
Abuse, 1579; Munday?, A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from 
Plays, 1580; Lodge, A Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays, 
1580 ?; Gosson, Apology of the School of Abuse, 1581; Gosson, Plays 
Confuted in five Actions, 1582; Field, J., A Godly Exhortation, 1 583; 
Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuse, 1583, five edd. to 1593; Whetstone, A 
Touchstone for the Time, 1 584; Rankins, A Mirror of Monsters, 
1587; Rainolds, The Overthrow of Stage-plays, 1599; Heywood, 
Apology for Actors, 1612; Greene, J., A Refutation of the Apology, 
1615; Field, N., Remonstrance, 1616; Anon., A Short Treatise Against 
Stage Plays, 1625. ^" *^^ general subject see E. N. S. Thompson, 
The Controversy between the Puritans and the Stage, Tale Studies, 1 903. 

PuTTENHAM, George, 1532-1590 .?. The Art of English Poesy, 
1589, repr. Arber, 1869; Partheniades, first pr. ed. Haslewood, 
Art of English Poesy, 1 81 1. 

Rainolds, Dr. John, i 549-1 607. De Romanae Ecclesiae 
Jdolatria, 1596; Overthrow of Stage-Plays, 1599. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, i 552-1 61 8. A Report of the Fight about 
the Isles of Azores, 1951, repr. by Hakluyt, 1595, and Arber, 1871; 
Discovery of the Empire of Guiana, 1596^, repr. by Hakluyt, 1598, 
ed. Schomburgk, Hakluyt Society, 1848. The History of the World, 
1614, fourteen edd. to 1687, repr. Edinburgh, 1820, 6 vols. Pre- 
rogatives of Parliament, ed. by Milton, 1658. Poems now first Col- 
lected, 1813. Contained in Hannah, Raleigh and other Courtly 
Poets, 1870. Bibliography by Brushfield, 1 908. 

Rankins, William, fl. 1587, d. 1601. A Mirror for Monsters, 
1587; The English Ape, 1588; Seven Satyres, 1598. No play of R. is 
extant. 

Reynolds, John, fl. 1606. Dolarnys Primrose, 1606; Epigram- 
mata, 161 1 ; The Triumphs of God's Revenge Against Mudrer, 1622- 
24; and other pamphlets. 

Richard II, A Tragedy of, first printed by Halliwell-Phillipps, 
1870. See Sh. Jahrbuch, xxxv. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 451 

Richard III, The True Tragedy of, 1 595, repr. Sh. Soc., 
1844. 

RiCHE, Barnabe, fl. 1574-1624. Don Simonides, 1581, 1584; 
Riche his Farewell to the Military Profession, 1581, 1606, lepr. Sh. 
Soc, 1846; Brusanus, Prince of Hungaria, 1592. Other pamphlets 
see Haslitt, Handbook, 503-506. 

Robinson, Clement, see Miscellanies. 

Rogers, Thomas, d. 161 6. Celestial Elegies, 1598, repr. Rox- 
burghe Club, Lamport Garland, 1887. Also the author of many 
reiigious tracts between 1576 and 1608. 

Rowlands, Samuel, 1573 ?-i628 ?. The Letting of Humor's 
Blood in the Head-Fein, 1600, seven edd. to 1613; 'T is Merry When 
Gossips Meet, 1602, seven edd. to 1675; Greene's Ghost, 1604, 1626; 
Diogenes Lanthorne, 1 607, eight edd. to 1 659; Doctor Merry-man, 
1607, thirteen other edd. Guy of Warwick, 1607, twelve other edd.; 
and twenty other like pamphlets of similar vogue. Collected ed. 
Gosse, Hunterian Club, 1 880, 3 vols. 

Rowley, Samuel, d. 1633 ?. When Tou See Me Tou Know Me, 
1605, four ^^^- to 1632; The Noble Soldier, 1634. 

Rowley, William, 1585-1642. A Search for Money, 1609; ''^P''' 
Percy Society, x, 1840; A New Wonder, 1632, Dodsley, xii; A Match 
at Midnight, 1633; Dodsley, vii; All's Lost by Lust, 1633; A Shoe- 
maker a Gentleman, 1638, both repr. by Stork, Publ. University of 
Pennsylvania, 1910; The Witch of Edmonton, 1658; Mermaid ed. 
Dekker, 1887; The Birth of Merlin, 1662, ed. Warnke and Proe- 
scholdt, 1887. 

RuGGLE, George, 1575-1622. Ignoramus, 1630^, 1658, 1659, 
1668 and four later. Transl. by Codrington, 1662; by Ravenscroft, 
1678. See Dissertation by J. L. Van Gundy, Jena, 1905. 

Sabbie, Francis, fl. 1595. The Fisherman's Tale, 1595, repr. 
Halliwell-Phillipps, 1867; Pan's Pipe, 1595; repr. by Bright and 
Mustard in Modern Philology, vii, 1910. Adam's Complaint, 1596. 

Sackville, Thomas (Earl Buckhurst), 1530-1608. The Com- 
plaint of the Duke of Buckingham, in The Mirror for Magistrates 
ed. 1563, and subsequent edd.; Gorboduc (with Norton), 1565, 1570, 
1590, repr. Manly, Specimens, ii, 1 897. For other works see 
Athenae Cantabrigienses, ii. 

Sandys, George, 1678-1644. The Relation of a Journey, 1615, 
six edd. to 1673; Ovid's Metamorphosis, transl. 1 621-1626, 1628, 
1632, 1640, 1656; Paraphrase of the Psalms, 1636; A Paraphrase 
upon the Divine Poems, 1 638; Solomon, 1641 2, 1642. 



452 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Satire, Elizabethan, see R. M. Alden, The Rise of Formal Satire 
in England, Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, vii, 1899. 

ScoLOKER, Antony, fl. 1604. Daiphantus, 1604. Garner, 
Longer Elizabethan Poems, 1903. 

Scott, Reginald, 1538-1599. The Hop Garden, 1574; The 
Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584, repr. ed. Nicholson, i886. 

Selden, John, 1584-1654. Latin and English Writings, 1610; 
Notes on Polyolbion, 1612, 1613; Titles of Honor, 1614; History of 
Tithes, 1 61 8; Table Talk, 1689 and many edd. Works, ed. Wilkins, 
1726, 3 vols. 

Seneca, translated. Troas, 1559, Thyestes, 1560, Hercules 
Furens, 1561, these three by Jasper Heywood; CEdipus, 1563, by 
Alexander Nevile; Medea, Agamemnon, both 1566, Hippolytus, and 
Hercules CEtaeus, 1581, these four by John Studley; Octavia, [n.d.], 
by Thomas Nuce; Thebias, by Thomas Nuce, who collected the work 
of his predecessors as Seneca his ten Tragedies translated, 1 581. 
Repr. Spenser Soc, 1887, 2 vols. See J. W. Cunliffe, The Influence 
of Seneca on English Tragedy, 1893. 

Shakespeare, Willi,\m, 1564-1616. Quartos: Venus and 
Adonis, 1593, eleven edd. to 1675; Lucrece, 1594, eight edd. to 161 1; 
Titus Andronicus, 1594, 1600, 161 1 ; Richard H, 1597, five edd. to 
1634; Richard HI, 1 597, eight edd. to 1629; Romeo and Juliet, 1597, 
four edd. to 1637; I Henry IF, 1598, eight edd. to 1639; Love's 
Labor 's Lost, 1598, 1631 ; The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, (2nd ed. lost), 
1612; The Merchant of Venice, 1600, four edd. to 1652; Henry V, 
1600, 1602, (1619); Much Ado About Nothing, 1600; 2 Henry IV, 
1600; A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 1600, (1619); The Merry Wives 
of Windsor, 1602, 1619, 1630; Hamlet, 1603, 1604-05, 1611, 1637; 
King Lear, 1608, (1619), 1655; Troilus and Cressida, 1609^; Pericles, 
1609, four issues to 1619; Sonnets, 1609, 1640; Othello, 1622, 1630, 
1655. Folios: First folio (contains these and the rest of the plays 
except Pericles), 1623; Second folio, repr. of the first, 1632; Third 
folio (contains all of the foregoing, Pericles, and six plays not Shake- 
speare's), 1664; Fourth folio, a reprint of the third, 1685. The fifteen 
additional quartos of single plays issued after the first folio, all of 
them, except The Taming of the Shrew, 1 63 1, are reprints of former 
quartos. 

The best of many reproductions of the Sh. folios is that of the first 
by Lee, 1902; and all four by Methuen & Co., 1903-06. The 
quartos were reproduced under the superintendence of Furnivall, 
1880-89, also by photography. The latest words on the Bibliography 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 453 

of the early edd. of Sh. are Lee, Bihlingraphical History of the First 
Folio, 1905, and Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, 1909, an 
admirable work. 

Critical edd. of Sh. began with Rowe, 1709; and through the edd. 
of Pope, 1723-25; Theobald, 1733; Johnson, 1765; Capell, 1767; 
Malone, "the first Variorum," 1790 and many more to Dyce, 1857; 
Halliwell, 1853-65; the Cambridge ed., 1863-56, which established 
practically our modern text, and many more to the monumental 
Variorum ed. of Furness 1873, 16 vols, to date and still in progress. 

In addition to the Life of Sh. by Halliwell- Phillipps, 1 88 1, most 
important of a score of recent biographies are those of Fleay, 1886, 
Dowden, 1893, Brandl, 1894, Brandes, 1896, Lee, 1898, Rolfe, 1904; 
Raleigh, 1907, Furnivall, 1909. Further references to Sh. Biblio- 
graphy may be found in the present author's Elizabethan Drama, 
1908, Bibliographical Essay, where previous bibliographies are noted. 

Shelton, Thomas, 1531-1620. The Delightful History of the 
Witty Knight, Don Quixote, l6i2, 2nd part, 1620, 1652, 1675; ed. 
Kelly, Tudor Translations, 1 896, 3 vols. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, i 554-1 586. Arcadia, 1590, reproduced ed. 
Sommer, 1891; sixteen edd. to 1674; Astrophel and Stella, 1591', 
repr. An English Garner, 1904; Defense of Poesie (An Apology for 
Poetry), 1 595, 1 598 with Arcadia and thereafter so printed, ed. Cook, 
1890; Certain Sonnets, 1 598, ed. of Arcadia; The Lady of May, 
1613 ed. of the same; Psalms, first printed 1823. Poems, ed. Grosart, 
1873, 3 vols.; Miscellaneous Works, ed. Gray, 1829; ed. Flijgel, 
Astrophel and Stella, 1 889. Life by Greville, 1 652; Symonds, Men 
of Letters, 1886. 

Smith, William, fl. 1596. See Sonnet Sequences. 

Sonnet Sequences and like Lyrical Collections. Puttenham, 
Partheniads, 1 579. GifFord, Posie of Gilli flowers, 1 580. Watson, 
Passionate Century of Love, 1 582. Soothern, Pandora, 1584, Munday, 
Banquet of Dainty Conceits, 1 588. Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 
1591. Constable, Diana; Daniel, Delia, 1592. Barnes, Partheno- 
phil; G. Fletcher, Licia; Lodge, Phillis; Watson, Tears of Fancy, 
1593. Barnfield, Affectionate Shepherd; Drayton, Idea's Mirror; 
Percy, Coelia; Willobie his Avisa; Zepheria, 1 594. Barnes, Century 
of Spiritual Sonnets; Chapman, A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy; 
E. C, Emaricdulph; J. C, Alcilia, 4 edd., Davies, Gulling Sonnets; 
Spenser, Amoretti, 1595. Griffin, Fidessa, Lynche, Diella; Smith, 
Chloris, 1596. Breton, Arbor of Amorous Devices; Lok, Sundry 
Sonnets; Tofte, Laura, 1597. Tofte, Alba, the Month's Mind, 1598; 



454 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The Passionate Pilgrim (Shakespeare), 1599. Chester Love's 
Martyr, 1601. Alexander, Aurora; Breton, The Passionate Shepherd; 
ScolokeT,Daiphantus,i6o4: Dolarny's Primrose, 1^06. Drummond, 
Poems, 1607. Shakespeare, Sonnets, 1609. Davies, Wit's Pil- 
grimage, 1610. Browne, Caelia, [1616]. Wither, Fidelia, 1617. 
Davies, Hymns to Astrcea, 1618. Wither, Fair Virtue, 1622. Gre- 
ville, Coelica, 1633. Constable, Spiritual Sonnets -1 8 15. See 
Schelling, Elizabethan Lyrics, 1895; S. Lee, Introduction to English 
Garner, Elizabethan Sonnets, 1904; Crow, Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles, 
1896-98. 

Southwell, Robert, 1562-1595. Saint Peters Complaint, 
1595^; eight edd. to 1615; Maonia, 1595, 1596, 1597; some half-dozen 
prose tracts between 1593 and 1595, chief among them, Mary Mag- 
dalen's Tears, 1594 and three other edd.; and The Triumphs over 
Death, 1595, 1596. Collected works, ed. Grosart, Fuller Worthies' 
Library, 1 872. 

Speed, John, 1552 ?-i629. History of Great Britain, 161 1, 1623, 
1632, 1650; Genealogies in Scripture, l6ll, 23 ^dd. to 1640. 

Spenser, Edmund, i 552-1 599. Epigrams and Sonnets in The 
Theater for Worldlings, 1569; The Shepherds' Calendar, 1 579, six 
edd. to 161 1 ; The Faery Queen, 1590-96, 1609, ed. Warren, 1896- 
1900; Complaints, 1591; Daphnatda, 1591, 1596; Coltn Clout's Come 
Home Again, Amoretti, Epithalamium, 1595; Four Hymns, Pro- 
thalamium, 1596, ed. Winstanley, 1907; A View of the Present State 
of Ireland, 1633. Collected Works, first folio 161 1 (second folio only 
of The Faery Queen), ed. Child, 1855, 5 vols.; Globe ed., by Hales and 
Morris, 1869; Grosart, 1882-84, 10 vols ; J. C. Smith, 1910, 3 
vols., in progress. Lives: Church, Men of Letters, 1879; Dowden, 
1888; and see Bibliography in Cambridge History of Literature. 

Stage, Elizabethan. See bibliography in Schelling, Elizabethan 
Drama; also W. Archer, The Elizabethan Stage, Quarterly Review, 
1908; V. G. Albright, The Shakespearian Stage, 1909; A. R. Skemp, 
Some Characteristics of the English Stage before the Restoration, Sh. 
Jahrbuch, xlv, 1909. 

Stanihurst, Richard, 1547-1618. Four Books of Vergil, 1582, 
1583, repr. Arber, English Scholar's Library, 1880; Description and 
History of Ireland contributed to Holinshed, ed. 1577; several Latin 
religious tracts. 

Stapleton, Thomas, i 535-1 598. History of the Church of 
England, 1 565; many controversial writings. Opera Omnia, 1620, 
includes the Apology for Philip II. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 455 

Stevenson, William, fl, 1550. Gammer Gurtons Needle, 
1562-3 (Diccon of Bedlam, Stationers' Register, this ed. lost); 1575. 
In Gayley, English Comedies, 1903. As to authorship, see Bradley in 
Athenceum, Aug. 6, 1898, and Chambers, Medieeval Drama, ii, 457. 

Still, John, i 543-1 608. Sometime reputed author of Gammer 
Gurton's Needle. See Stevenson, William. 

Stow, John, 1525-1605. Editor of Chaucer, 1561, assisting in 
Speight's ed. of the same, 1598; Summary of English Chronicles, 
1565, ten edd. to 1604; editor, Matthew of Westminster, 1567, of 
Matthew of Paris, 1571, of Thomas of Walsingham, 1574; Annals of 
England, 1580, five edd. to 1631; Survey of London, 1598, four edd. 
to 1633. 

Stubbs, Philip, fl. 1580-1593. The Anatomy of Abuse, two parts, 
1583, four edd. to 1595. Repr. AT^^i/iSA. 5oc., 1877 and 1882. Several 
religious tracts between 1581 and 1593, for which see Sh. Sac. Papers, 
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Studley, John, fl. 1566-81. See Seneca Translated. 

Stukeley, The Famous {Chronicle) History of Captain Thomas^ 
1605, Simpson, School of Shakspere, 1878. 

Surrey, Earl of (Henry Howard), I5I7?-I547. See Miscel- 
lanies. 

Swetnam, Joseph, fl. 1615. The Arraignment of Women, 1615, 
five edd. to 1690; and other satirical pamphlets. See Grosart, repr. 
Swetnam the Woman Hater, 1 620, Occasional Issues, 1880. 

Sylvester, Joshua, 1563-1618. A Canticle of the Victory at 
Ivry, 1590; fragments of transl. of La Semaine, 1 592-1 605; Du 
Bartas, his Divine Weeks and Works, 1606, six edd. to 1641. Also 
several minor works, mostly translations. Collective ed. Grosart, 
Chertsey Worthies' Library, 1880, 2 vols. 

Taming of a Shrew, The, 1594. Repr. Sh. Quartos, 1886; Shake- 
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Tarlton, Richard, d. 1588. See Halliwell-Phillipps, ed. 
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1598, facsimile ed. Furnivall, 1887. 

Thracian Wonder, The, "Webster and Rowley," Two New Plays, 
1 66 1. Dyce's Webster. 

ToFTE, Robert, d. 1619 ?. Two Tales of Ariosto, 1597; Laura, 
1597, Garner, Sonnets, ii; Alba the Month s Mind, 1598, Grosart, 
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Tomkins, Thomas, 1614. Albumazar, 1615, 1634, 1668; Lingua, 
1617, five edd. to 1657 doubtfully by Tomkins. Dodsley, ix and xi. 



456 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Tom Tyler and his Wife^ 1 66 1, ed. Schelling, Mod. Lang. Publ., 
XV, 1900. 

TotteVs Miscellany, 1557. See Miscellanies. 

ToURNEUR, Cyril, i 575-1 626. The Transformed Metamorphosis, 
1600; two or three panegyrics, between 1609 and 1613; The Revenger s 
Tragedy, 1607; The Atheist's Tragedy, 161 1. Plays and Poems, tA. 
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Tragedy, for the Bibliography of, see Bibliographical Essay, 
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Tragicomedy. See A. H. Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont 
and Fletcher on Shakespeare, 1901; and Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 
chapter xvii. 

Translators. For an excellent bibliography of English trans- 
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Translations of Great Foreign Classics, 1909; T. G. Tucker, The 
Foreign Debt of English Literature, 1907. 

Trial of Chivalry, The, 1605. Bullen, Old Plays, vol. iii. 

Turberville, George, 1530-1594?. Epitaphs, Epigrams, etc., 
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1567, 1572, 1594, 1597; Heroical Epistles of Ovid, 1567, five edd. to 
1605; A Plain Path to Virtue, 1568; The Book of Falconry, 1575; 
The Noble Book of Venery, iS75i repr. together, 161 1 ; Tragical Tales 
(chiefly from Boccaccio), 1576, 1587, repr. Edinburgh, 1837. 

Tusser, Thomas, fl. 1525-1580. A Hundredth Good Points of 
Husbandry, 1 557; Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry, 1573, 
fifteen edd. to 1672; repr. English Dialect Society, 1878; The Book of 
Huswifery, 1562, appended to edd. of the last. 

Two Tragedies in One (Yarington, R.), i6or. Repr. Bullen, Old 
Plays, iv. 

Twine, Lawrence, fl. 1576. The Pattern of Painful Adventures, 
[1576 ?], 1595, 1607. Repr. Shakespeare's Library, 1843. 

Udall, John, 1560 ?-i592. See Martin Marprelate Controversy. 

Udall, Nicholas, 1505.?-! 556. Flowers of Latin Speaking out 
of Terence, 1 533, several later edd.; Apophthegms of Erasmus, 1542; 
Ralph Roister Doister, 1566, repr. Arber, 1869, in Gayley, Representa- 
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Valiant Welshman, The, 1615, 1663; repr. by Kreb, Miinchener 
Beitrage, 1902. 

Voyages. See Garner, Travelers' Tales, 1 903, 2 vols. E. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 457 

J. Payne, Voyages of Elizabethan Seamen, 1893-igoo, 4 vols.; 
J. A. Froude, English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century, 1901. Bib- 
liography, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iv, 19 10 and 
see Hakluyt. 

Wadeson, Anthony, fl. 1600. Look About Tou, 1600. Dodsley, 
vii. 

Warner, William, 1558-1609. Pan his Syrinx, 1584, 1597; 
Albion's England, completed by accretions in nine edd., 1586 to 161 2; 
repr. Chalmers' English Poets, 1810, vol. iv. Menaechmi of Plautus, 
transl., 1595. 

Warning for Fair Women, A, 1599, Simpson, School of Shakspere, 
1878. 

War of the Theaters, see J. H. Penniman, monograph of that 
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in Forschungen zur englischen Sprache, i, 1899; H. C. Hart, in Notes 
and Queries, series ix, 1903; and the forthcoming ed. by Penniman of 
Poetaster and Satiromastix, Belles Lettres Series. 

Wars of Cyrus, The, 1594, repr. Sh. Jahrbuch, xxxvii, 1 901. 

Watson, Thomas, 1557-1592. Hecatompathia or the Century 
of Love, 1582, repr. Arber, 1869; Italian Madrigals Englished, 1590; 
The Tears of Fancy, 1 593, Garner, Sonnets, i, 1 904. Latin verses 
in transl. of Greek and Italian authors between 1 581 and 1592. 

Weakest Goeth to the Wall, The, by "Webster and Dekker," 1600. 

Webbe, William, fl. 1 568-1 586. A Discourse of English Poetry, 
1586, repr. Arber, 1870. 

Webster, John, 1580 f-lSz^. Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Hoe, 
Northward Hoe (all with Dekker) and each in 1607; ^^^ White 
Devil, 1 61 2, 1 63 1, 1665, 1672; The Duchess of Malfi, 1623, 1640, 
1678, 1708; The Devil's Law Case, 1623; Appius and Virginia, 1654; 
two new plays: A Cure for a Cuckold, The Thracian Wonder, "by 
Webster and William Rowley," 1661, neither of them Webster's. 
Works ed. Dyce, 1830, 4 vols.; Mermaid ?)tnes,Webster and Tourneur, 
contains the two great tragedies as does Webster ed. Sampson, Belles 
Letters Series, 1904. 

Weelkes, Thomas, fl. 1597. Madrigals, 1597, repr. Musical 
Antiquarian Society, 1845; Ballets and Madrigals, 1 598, 1608; 
Madrigals for Viols and Voices, 1600; Madrigals, 1 600; Airs or 
Fantastic Sprites, 1 608. Also contributions to other musical collections. 

Weever, John, 1576-1632. Epigrams, 1599; The Mirror of 
Martyrs, 1601, repr. Roxburghe Club, 1873; Agnus Dei, "a thumb 
book," 1606; Ancient Funeral Monuments, 1 63 1. 



458 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Whetstone, George, fl. 1576-1587. The Rock of Regard, 1576; 
repr. Collier Reprints; Remembrances (metrical lives), 1577-85; 
Promos and Cassandra, 1578, repr. Shakespeare's Library, ed. Collier- 
Hazlitt, 1875; An Heptameron of Civil Discourses, 1582, 1593 (under 
title Aurelia); and other prose tracts. 

Whitehorne, Peter, fl. 1560. The Art of Waroi Macchiavelli, 
1560, 1573. Tudor Translations, 1905. 

Whitgift, John (Archbishop of Canterbury), 1530 ?-l6o4. For 
Bibliography see D. N. B., Ixi. 

WlLBYE, John, fl. 1598-1614. Two sets of Madrigals in 1598 
and 1608. Also contributor to other musical collections. Ed. J. 
Turle, 1840-41, and ed. Budd, 1846. 

Wilkins, George, fl. 1608. The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, 
1607; repr. Dodsley, x; The Travails of Three English Brothers, 1607, 
Bullen, ed. Day. The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of 
Tyre, 1608. 

WiLLES, Richard, fl. 1558-1573. Latin poems, 1573; editor with 
Richard Eden of The History of Travel, 1577; and of articles in 
Hakluyt's Voyages. 

Willobie his Avisa, 1 594, five edd. to 1635. Ed. Grosart, Occa- 
sional Issues, 1880. 

WiLMOT, Robert, fl. 1568-16 19. Tancred and Gismund, 1591, 
Dodsley, vii. 

Wilson, Robert (the elder) fl. 1 584-1 600. The Three Ladies of 
London, 1584; The Three Lords and Three Ladtes of London, 1590, 
both in Dodsley, vi; The Cobbler s Prophecy, 1594, repr. Sh. Jahrbuch, 
1897; The Pedlar s Prophecy, 1595. 

Wilson, Sir Thomas, fl. 1550. The Rule of Reason, Containing 
the Art of Logic, 1551, seven edd. to 1580; The Art of Rhetoric, 1553, 
five edd. to 1585. 

Wingfield, Anthony, or Forsett, Edward. Pedantius, 1631. 
Ed. J. C. M. Smith, Materialien zur Kunde, 1905. 

Wither, George, 1588-1667. Prince Henry s Obsequies, jf6i2, 
1617; Epithalamia, 1613, 1620; Abuses Stript and Whipt, 1613, 1614, 
1615, 1617; A Satyre, 1615; The Shepherd's Hunting, 1615, 1620; 
Fidelia, 1617^, 1619, 1620; Wither s Motto, 1621^; Fair Virtue, 1622. 
Works, 1620 (a surreptitious volume), Juvenilia, 1622, 1626, 1633. 
The rest of Wither's copious bibliography belongs to controversy and 
uninspired religious edification. Mod. edd. Spenser Soc, 1870-83, 
in 20 parts. Selections ed. Morley, Companion Poets, 1 89 1. 

Woodstock, The Tragedy of Thomas of, see Richard //. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 459 

WoTTON, Henry, fl. 1580. A Courtly Controversy of Cupid's 
Cautels, 1581. 

WoTTON, Sir Henry, 1568-1639. Elements of Architecture, 1624; 
Ad Re gem, 1633; The State of Christendom, 1 637; ReliquicB Wotton- 
ianae, 1651, four edd. to 1685. Poems, ed. Dyce, 1842; with Raleigh, 
ed. Hannah, 1870. 

Yarington, Robert, fl. 1600. Two Lamentable Tragedies, 1601, 
Bullen, Old Plays, iv. 

Yorkshire, Tragedy, The, 1608, 1619. See Pseudo-Shakespeare. 

Young, Bartholomew, d. 1621. Guazzo's Civil Conversation, 
1586; Amorous Fiametta, 1587; Montemayor's Diana, 1598, in part 
repr'd. Collier, Sh. Library, ii, 1843. 

Yonge, Nicholas, d. 1619. Musica Transalpina, 1588, words 
reprinted in Garner, Shorter Poems, 1903. 

Zepheria, see Sonnet Sequences. 



INDEX 



Actors, see players 

Adams, Thomas, 315 

Admiral's players, the, 81, 96, 
183, 329, 232 

^schylus, 250, 371 

Alabaster, William, alluded to 
by Spenser, 53; his Roxana, 
383 

Alamanni, 318 

Albright, V. E., 87 

Alengon, Due d', 70 

Alengon, Marguerite d', 49 

Alexander, Sir William, his 
Aurora, 135; 373; the Mon- 
archic Tragedies of, 240; 
praised by Drummond, 374; his 
completion of Sidney's Arcadia, 

Allen, Cardinal, 298, 302 

Alleyn, Edward, 67, builds the 
Fortune theater, 84; creation of 
the title roles of Marlowe, 87; 
Hieronimo in The Spanish 
Tragedy, a favorite role of, 94; 
96 ; his association with Hens- 
lowe and success as an actor, 
100, loi ; befriends Dekker, 
173 ; founds Dulwich College, 
182; 183, 232, 424 

Amyot, Jaques, Bishop of Auxerre, 
translator of Plutarch, 273 ; 
Sir Thomas North meets, 278 

Anacreon, imitated by Sidney, 27; 
246 

Andrews, Launcelot, notable in 
theological controversy, 307; his 
eloquence, 315 

Angelo, Michael, 410 

Anne, Queen, of James I, 386, 
her Children of the Revels, 82, 
402 

Anthologies of lyrics, 22, 191, 192 

Antiquarian studies, books of, 
Camden's, 292, 293 ; Selden, 
Speed and Cotton, their interest 
in, 297; Stow and his, of Lon- 
don, 297, 298 ; Wotton and, 298 



Anton, Robert, his Vice's Anat- 
omy, 327 
Apuleius, translated, 273 
Aquinas, Thomas, 312 
Arcadianism, 43, 44 
Archer, W., 85 note 
Arden of Feversham, 89, 90; most 
notable of the murder plays, 
184, 185; why not by Shakes- 
peare, 184, 185; 250 
Areopagus, the, 25, 26; Spenser 

and the, 46 
Argyle, Countess of, 135 
Ariosto, Spenser and, 47, 48, 56; 
112; translated, 280, 281; 318 
Aristophanes, 235 
Aristotle, 268 
Armin, Robert, his jests, 104; his 

satfrical tracts, 329 
Arnold, Matthew, 44, 277 
Arundel, Earl of, interested in 

madrigals, 195 
Ascham, Roger, 4; on English 
prose, 8, 9 ; on classical versifi- 
cation in English, 26; 39, 54, 
299 
Aubrey, John, 47, his opinion of 
the Latin of Shakespeare, 151; 
on Jonson's Carlo Buffone, 234 
Audeley, John, his Fraternity of 

Vagabonds, 328 
Augustine, St., 290 
Babington conspiracy, the, 106 
Bacon, Anthony, 347 
Bacon, Francis, 4, 9, 13, 34, Bre- 
ton dedicates his Essays to, 107; 
protests against religious con- 
troversy, 115, 338; 151, 169, 
219, 249, 272, 291, 293, on the 
plagiarism of Hayward, 294; 
298, 299 ; on the administration 
of Ireland, 300; Jonson's opin- 
ion of, 306; 313; influence of 
the Essays of, 335; reasons for 
the prominence of, 337; his life, 
337-342; his friendship with 
Essex, 338-340; rivalry with 



461 



462 



INDEX 



Coke, 338, 339, 341; Elizabeth's 
and Burleigh's mistrust of, 339, 
340; honored by King James, 
340; conducts the trial of Essex 
and of Raleigh, 340, 341 ; raised 
to the peerage, and Lord Chan- 
cellorship, 340; his trial and 
disgrace, 341, 342; his legal 
works, 342; The Advancement 
of Learning of, 342-344; The 
Great Instauratio (or Restora- 
tion), 343-346; The Novum 
Organum or new method, 342, 
343 ; the philosophical system 
of, 343 ; other parts of the sys- 
tem of, 344; his experimental 
philosophy, 344; not the discov- 
erer of induction, 344, 345 ; un- 
fruitfulness of the method of, 
345 ; his distrust of scientific 
discoveries and limitations as 
a philosopher, 346; literary 
works of, 346-349 ; the Essays 
of, 346-348 ; the matchless style 
and worldly wisdom of the 
Essays of, 347, 348 ; Jonson on 
the eloquence of, 348 ; ceaseless 
revision of his work by, 349 ; 
his History of Henry VH and 
Neiv Atlantis, 349; variety of 
the literary style of, 349 ; his 
mistrust of English and pref- 
erence for Latin, 349, 350; his 
insensibility to the literature of 
his age, 350; his interest in 
court drama, 350; his support 
of masques and condescension 
as to them, 350, 351; 395; his 
contempt for poetry, 351; the 
"poems," their mediocrity and 
pessimism, 351-353; the verse 
of, contrasted with the poetry 
of Shakespeare, 353, 354; the 
writer of the Shakespearean 
plays contrasted with, 354, 355; 
incredibility of the notion of any 
part in the Shakespearean plays 
by, 355. 356; 363, 401, 422 
Bacon, Nicholas, Sir, 337 
Bagehot, Walter, 138, 151 
Baldwin, William, chief author 
of The Mirror for Magistrates, 
7. 10s 
Bale, John, his King Johan, 63 
Ballade, employed by Wyatt, 21, 
misunderstood by Grimald, 21 



Bandello, a source for Shakes- 
peare, 164, 283; Painter's debt 
to, 282 

Bannister, John, 204 

Barclay, Alexander, 49, 317 

Barkstead, William, his Mtrrha, 
225 

Barnes, Barnabe, continues the 
Italian impulse of Sidney, 126; 
his Parthenope, 126, 127; 
French sources of, 130; 131; 
Spiritual Sonnets of, 132; 144, 
145 ; his Tragedy of Pope 
Alexander, 257 

Barnfield, Richard, 123, poems of, 
attributed to Shakespeare, 124, 
191, 198; a writer of eclogues, 
223 

Barrey, Lodowick, his comedy of 
Ram Alley, 187 

Barrow, Henry, antimartinist exe- 
cuted, 114 

Basse, William, pastoral elegies 
of, 224 

Bastard, Thomas, his Chrestoleros, 
326,327 

Beaumont, Francis, 179, 182, 
cynical vein in the lyrics of, 
207; his Salmacis and Herma- 
phoditus, 217, 218; not the 
author of Britain's Ida, 218; 
Bacon a "chief contriver" in 
the masque of, 350, 395; 358, 
389? 393 ; his Masque of the 
Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, 
395 > 399; the relations of 
Fletcher to, 400-404; life of, 
401 ; the "Plays of Beaumont 
and Fletcher" a misnomer, 401 ; 
not a professional dramatist, 
402; Jonson and, 402; style and 
verse of, contrasted with those 
of, 402-404; Philaster ?nd its 
type, 405, 406 ; other plays in 
which Fletcher had hand with, 
406; 411; his Woman Hater 
and Knight of the Burning 
Pestle influenced by Jonson, 
415; romantic comedies of, with 
Fletcher, 416, 417; The Maid's 
Revenge, 417; the folio edd. of, 
and Fletcher, 424 

Beaumont, Sir Francis, 401 

Bedford, Earl of, 25 

Bedford, Lucy Harington, Coun- 
tess of, 25 ; a patron of Drayton, 



INDEX 



463 



212; complimented in verse by 
Jonson, 245, 246; a friend and 
patron of Donne, 363, 371 

Bedingfield, Thomas, translator 
of Macchiavelli's Florentine 
History, 284 

Bellarmine, Cardinal, 298, 315 

Belleforest, his collection of tales 
a source for English translators 
and playwrights, 282, 283 

Bellenden, John, translator of 
Livy, 273 

Bellum Grammaticale, 379, 381 

Belvidere or the Garden of the 
Muses, a book of quotations, 
193 

Be-reblock, John, on the setting of 
a college play, 78 

Bernard, Edward, astronomer, his 
strictures on the philosophical 
system of Bacon, 346 

Berners, John Bouchier, Lord, 
translator of Guevara, 284 

Beza, Theodore, assists in the 
Geneva Version of the Bible, 
289 

Bible, considered as an English 
classic, 286; not characterized 
by likeness of parts, 286, 287; 
its extraordinary diction and 
style, 287; Tyndale fixes the 
literary style of the, 287; his 
version complete called the 
Matthews, 288 ; Coverdale and 

■ the, 288 ; the Great, or Cran- 
mer's, 288 ; Taverner's, 288 ; 
The Geneva, 289; The Bish- 
ops', 289; the Roman Catholic 
version of the, in English, 289, 
290; the Authorized Version of 
the, 290; reasons for the super- 
lative quality of the English, 
290, 291 

Billy, Jacques de, 130 

Blackfriars, the theater at, 68, 69, 
78; boy actors at, 68, 69; cost 
ef, 79 ; relations of Burbage 
and Shakespeare to, 82; loi, 
232, 413 

Blair, Robert, 133 

Blank-verse, the earliest, 21 ; of 
Peele, 76; 97, 100; of Shakes- 
peare, 169-171; of Beaumont 
and Fletcher distinguished, 

403, 404 
Blennerhasset, Thomas, an editor 



of The Mirror for Magistrates, 

7 
Boas, F. S., 93 
Boccaccio, 282, 409 
Bodenham, John, 191 
Bodin, 301 
Bodley, Thomas, founder of the 

Library at Oxford, 297 
Boece, Hector, ii 
Boiardo, translated, 281 
Boisteau, 282, 283 
Boleyn, Anne Queen, 64 
Bower, Richard, minor play- 
wright, 67 
Boy-actors, 67, 68 ; impressment 

of under royal patent, 68, 69 ; 

78; women's parts taken by. 87; 

prominence of the, in the war 

of the theaters, 2'?2 
Boyle, Elizabeth, wife of Spenser, 

53, 139 

Bradstreet, Mistress Anne, iii 

Braithwaite, Richard, his Strap- 
pado of the Devil, 327 

Breton, Nicholas, 49, pamphlets 
of, 103, 105-107; his life, 106; 
pastoral lyrics of, 123, 124, 132; 
devotional sonnets of, 133; his 
Passionate Shepherd, 135; in 
England's Helicon, 191; 192; 
his Characters, 335, 422; con- 
temporary popularity of, 423 

Bridges, John, Bishop of Oxford, 
sometime Dean of Salisbury, 
64, 114 

Bright, Dr Timothy, founder of 
the art of stenography, and his 
Charactery, 299 

Brinsley, John, his educational 
writings, 299 

Brooke. Arthur, his Romeus and 
Juliet, 3, 282, 283 

Brooke, Christopher, friend and 
collaborator with Browne in 
the pastoral, 223, 225 ; friend 
of Donne, 358 ; committed to 
prison for his part in Donne's 
marriage, 362 

Brooke, Lord, See Greville, Fulke 

Browne, Sir Thomas, 10 

Brewne, William, of Tavistock, 
135; influenced by Spenser, 223; 
life of, 225 ; his Britannia's 
Pastorals and other poetry, 225- 
227; his patriotism and other 
qualities, 226, 227; influenced 



464 



INDEX 



by Sylvester, 285 ; an intimate 
of Donne, 358; 371, 393; his 
masque Ulysses and the Sirens, 
396 

Browning, Robert, 143, 368 

Bruno, Giordano, and Sidney, 19, 
24 

Bryskett, Lodowick, 51, 57 

Buc, Sir George, 225 

BuUen, A. H., 197, 198 

Burbage, Cuthbert, 81, 82 

Burbage, James, 68 ; fits up the 
Priory House in Blackfriars as 
a playhouse, 79 ; builds the 
Theatre in Shoreditch, 83 ; loi, 
232 

Burbage, Richard, 67, 69 ; leases 
the theater in Blackfriars to a 
sharing company, 82 ; demol- 
ishes the Theater to build the 
Globe, 83, 84; creator of the 
chief roles of Shakespeare, 87, 
100; his career, 100; emblazons 
an impressa of Shakespeare's 
designs, 100; alleged painter of 
a portrait of Shakespeare, 100; 
retired with a competence from 
the stage, 183; mimicked on the 
academic stage, 381 ; 424 

Burleieh, William Cecil, Lord, 
35, reduces Spenser's pension 
for The Faery Queen, 52; a 
patron of Lyly, 69 ; 149 ; his 
Precepts to his Son, 299 ; his 
mistrust of Bacon, 338 

Burns, Robert, 201 

Burton, Robert, 299 

Byrd, William, a publisher of 
song-books, 195, 196 

Caesar, Julius, 3 ; translated, 273, 
274 

Calvin, John, 289, his conception 
of a Christian republic, 308, 
309 ; his influence on English 
Puritanism, 309 

Camden, William, loi, 151, be- 
friends Jonson, 229 ; 249, 278 ; 
his Britannia, 278, 292 ; his idea 
of research, 292; his Annals of 
Elizabeth and Remains, 293, 
294; member of an antiquarian 
society, 297 ; 422 

Campion, Edmund, the Jesuit, 11 

Campion, Thomas, 27, 192 ; 
author of the words and music 
of his song books, 197; 198; 



life of, 199; his Observations in 
Poesy, 199; classical inspiration 
of, 199, 200; his secular and 
reliirious lyrics, 199, 200; 203; 
masques of, 392, 393, 395; 411 

Canzone, the, 27 

Cardenio, a lost play attributed 
to Shakespeare, 413 

Carew, Richard, translator of 
Tasso, 281 

Carew, Thomas, 249,372 

Carey, Robert, Earl of Monmouth, 
300 

Carlyle, Thomas, 103 

Carr, Sir Robert, Viscount Ro- 
chester, Earl of Somerset, friend 
of Overbury and party to his 
murder, 333, 334 

Casaubon, Isaac, 298, translator 
of Theophrastus, 331 

Castiglione, Baldassare, The 
Courtier of, translated, 3, 4; 
his picture of the cultivated so- 
ciety of the Renaissance, 19, 20, 
24; Sir Thomas Hoby, transla- 
tor of, 284 

Castro, de, author of the source 
of Love's Cure, attributed to 
Fletcher, 419 note 

Cato, 3 

Catullus, 200, 246 

Cavendish, William, his Life of 
Wolsey, 6, 292 

Cawarden, Sir Thomas, Master 
of the Revels, 78 

Cayet, 285 

Cecil, Sir Robert, refuses the use 
of the council-chest for histori- 
cal research, 293 ; his apathy 
towards his cousin Bacon, 338 

Cellini, 410 

Cervantes, his Don Quixote, trans- 
lated, 285 ; a source for English 
plays, 413, 416, 417 

Chamberlain, the Lord, his play- 
ers, the company of Shakes- 
peare, 80; at the Theater, the 
Curtain and the Globe, 81 ; 
leadership of, 183, 184; Shakes- 
peare prominent in, 230; and 
its rivals in the latter years of 
Elizabeth, 232; act Every Man 
In His Humor, 234 

Chapel Royal, Children of the, 
early plays of the, 67, 68 ; at 
Blackfriars, 69 ; alleged to have 



INDEX 



465 



been under the royal patronage, 
69 ; 79, 100, 232 ; their prom- 
inence, 235 ; their part in the 
war of the theaters, 236, 238, 
239 
Chapman, George, his Coronet of 
Sonnets, 132, dedicatory sonnets 
prefixed to his Homer, 134; 
perhaps' the other poet of 
Shakespeare's Sonnets, 144; 
■i55> 192, 208 ; completes Mar- 
lowe's Hero and Leander, 215, 
216; 224; his practice of the 
comedy of humors, 230, 231; 
collaborates with Jonson and 
Marston, 242; 249; his tragedy 
on Cassar and Pompey, 254; 
255; Bussy D'Ambois and other 
tragedies on French history, 
256, 257; his clumsiness in 
treatment of the supernatural, 
260; his translation of Homer, 
273 ; life of, 274, 275 ; early 
comedies of, 275 ; his romantic 
comedies, 275 ; original poetry 
of, 275 ; his translation of 
Homer, 275-278 ; as a trans- 
lator, 277, 278 ; on obscurity in 
poetry, 323 ; 371 ; a writer of 
masques, 393 ; his Masque of 
the Middle Temple and Lin- 
coln's Inn, 395; 399; 411, his 
Whole Works of Homer, 423 

"Characters," defined, 331; their 
origin in Theophrastus, 331; 
forerunners of, in Chaucer and 
Jonson, 331, 332; of Hall, 332, 
of Overbury, 333-335; of Bre- 
ton, 107, 335; of others, 336 

Charlemagne, the heroical drama 
of, 178 

Charles I, King, 34, 244, 256, 322, 
371, 382, 390, 394, 417 

Charles H, King, 9 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 9, 20, 21, 29 ; 
an inspiration to Spenser, 46, 
48; 56; influence of meters of, 
on Spenser, 60; his Knighfs 
Tale dramatized, 67, 112; a 
source for The Midsummer- 
Nighfs Dream, 157; the Troilus 
story as treated by Shakespeare 
and, 167; 175, 331, 378 

Chester, Charles, supposedly ridi- 
culed by Jonson, 234, 235 



Chester, Robert, his Love's Mar- 
tyr, 192 
Chettle, Henry, his recognition of 
Shakespeare, 149, 159; his col- 
laboration with Munday, 161, 
163 ; his Hoffman and its in- 
ventive horrors, 259 
Child, C. G._, 128 note 
Chrashaw, Richard, 222 
Chronicle history in prose, its 
forerunners, 5 ; variety of, 5, 6 ; 
of Fabyan, Grafton, Stow and 
others, 6 ; of Holinshed, 6, 10- 
13; Elizabethan conception of, 
13 ; as a source for Shakespeare, 
13, 14; Foxe's Book of Mar- 
tyrs as a, 14, 15 
Chronicle play, 89 ; nature of the, 
157, 158 ; apprenticeship of 
Shakespeare in the, 158; rivalry 
of Shakespeare and Marlowe in 
the, 160, i6i ; Peele, Heywood 
and others in the, 161; height 
of the, 162; obituary group of, 
163 ; legendary history in, 163, 
164 
Churchyard, Thomas, 3 ; his con- 
tribution to The Mirror for 
Magistrates, 7; 23, 52; pam- 
phlets of, 105, 106 ; 209 
Cicero, 3, 9, 35, 43 
Cinthio, 155, his Hecatommithi a 
source for Shakespeare, 265 ; 
282 
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Lord, 

422 
Clifton, Henry, 68, 69 
Cobham, Lord, 11 
Coke, Sir Edward, a rival and 
enemy of Bacon, 338, 339, 341 
Coleridge, S. T., on Shakespeare's 

narrative poems, 217; 277 
Colet, John, 287 

College drama, its character and 
limitations, 378, 379 ; early 
writers of, 379; Pedantius and 
Helium Grammaticale, 379 ; 
the Parnassus trilogy, 379-381; 
Lingua and Narcissus, 381, 382; 
theatromania at Oxford, 382; 
Alabaster's Roxana and 

Gwinne's Nero, 383 ; Ignora- 
mus, 383, 384 
Collins, Churton, 151 
Comedians, see Players 
Comedy, first regular, 64, 65 ; 



466 



INDEX 



early romantic, 65, 66, 89; Lyiy 
in, 70-73; Peele in, 74-76; pre- 
sentation of early, 77, 78; 
Greene in, 91, 92 ; experimen- 
tal, of Shakespeare, 154; early 
romantic, of Shakespeare, 155- 
158; of Dekker, 173-177; Hey- 
wood in, 178, 179, 181 ; minor 
writers of, 182; Middleton in, 
of manners, 186, 187; lesser, of 
manners, 187, 188; Middieton 
in romantic, 188-190; Jonson 
and the, of humors, 230, 231; 
satirical, of Jonson, 232-238, 
242; Jonson's of London life, 
242-244; last, of Jonson, 244, 
245 ; Roman, in imitation at the 
universities, 378, 379; academic 
379-384; pastoral, 384-391; 
Fletcher follows Middleton in, 
400; Fletcher in, 415-417 

Comines, 9 

Companies of players, see under 
Shakespeare, Chamberlain's, 

Pembroke's, King's players, etc. 

Conceit, the conventional 32, de- 
veloped under influence of 
Petrarch, 127, 128 ; examples 
of, in Sidney, Drayton and 
others, 128 ; in the sonnet- 
sequences, 134, 135; not an in- 
vention of Donne, 368 ; the 
Donnian, distinguished from 
that of his successors, 369-371 

Condell, Henry, a sharer with 
Shakespeare in the Globe 
theater and Blackfriars, 82; 141 

Conqueror plays, 100 

Constable, Henry, a pastoralist, 
123 ; his sonnets to Diana, 129 ; 
a borrower from the French, 
130; 131; "spiritual sonnets" of, 
132, 133; conceits in, 134 

Controversy, the Nash-Harvey, 
300; classical verse in English 
poetry, 300; Puritan, as to 
social abuses, 301 ; concerning 
witches, 301 ; religious, 306 ; 
between Protestantism and 
Rome, 307, 308 ; between the 
Church of England and Jesuit- 
ism, 307; between the Church 
of England and Puritanism, 
307-309; Hooker and Travers 
in, 310; and see Marprelate 
controversy 



Cooke, Anne, mother of Bacon, 
337 

Cooke, Joshua, his Hoiv a Man 
May Choose a Good Wife from 
a Bad, 175 

Cooper, Thomas, Bishop of Win- 
chester, 114 

Correggio, 214 

Coryate, Thomas, strange person- 
ality of, 302, 303 ; his Crudities 
and other books, 303 

Costume, in early court plays, 77; 
sumptuous variety of, in Lin- 
gua, 382; handsome, of the 
masques, 391, 393 

Coterie, literature of the, 19, 24- 
34 

Cotton, Charles, 21, 286 

Cotton, Sir Robert Bruce, collector 
of old manuscripts, 297 

Court, the, as the center of cul- 
ture, 20, 24, 25; Spenser at, 51; 
the drama at, 63-79 ; struggle 
between the city and the, as to 
the popular drama, 88 ; later 
influence of the, on the drama, 
378; plays of Daniel at, 386; 
Jonson and the masque at, 391- 
398 

Courthope, W. J., 37, 219 

Coverdale, Miles, his work as a 
translator of the Bible, 288; 
becomes Bishop of Exeter, 289; 
escapes overseas, 289 ; assists in 
the revision of the Gene'va 
Version, 289 

Cowley, Abraham, mistakes about 
Donne and, 364, 365; the Donn- 
ian conceit distinguishable from 
that of, 369, 370 

Cox, F. A., 195 

Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, his part in the 
m,aking of the English Bible, 
288, 289; his controversial writ- 
ings, 307 

Crashaw, Thomas, 370 

Cromwell, Oliver, Cavalier story 
of, an actor in Lingua, 382 

Cromwell, Thomas, Earl of Essex, 
encourages Coverdale in the 
making of the English Bible, 
288 

Cross-Keys, the playhouse, 81 

Curtain, the, in Moorsfield, 81, 
83 



INDEX 



467 



Curtius, Quintus, 3 

Cynicism in the lyrics, of Beau- 
mont, 207; of Donne, 360 

Daborne, Robert, his pastoral 
play. The Poor Man's Comfort, 
390 

Daniel, Samuel, 8 ; a later member 
of the Areopagus, 26 ; his De- 
fense of Rime, 27, 52; the suc- 
cessor of Lyly as the entertainer 
of the court, 79, loi ; life of, 
129 ; his sonnets, Delia, 129, 
i34> 137. 138; Nash procures the 
publication of sonnets of, 142, 
144; answers Campion, 199; 
song in the masques of, 207 ; of 
the Sidneian circle, 209, 210; 
narrative poetry of, 210, 211; 
his Musophilus, 219, 220; 224; 
ridiculed by Jonson, 234, 235, 
248 ; Senecan tragedies of, 240 ; 
his Cleopatra, 240, 255; 286; 
his History of England, 294, 
422 ; on obscurity in poetry, 
323 ; 373 ; his Queen's Arcadia, 
386-388; his Hymen's Triumph, 
390; a rival of Jonson in the 
masque, 392, 393 ; his Tethys' 
Festival, 395 ; criticizes pedan- 
try in Jonson, 396; 422; the 
many edd. of his works, 423 

Dante, 27, 32 

Davenant, Sir William, 249, 400 

Davey, H., 197 

Davies, John, of Hereford, his 
sonnets, Wifs Pilgrimage, 133, 
135, 226; his Scourge of Folly, 
327; refers to Philaster, 405 

Davies, Sir John, 130; his Gulling 
Sonnets, 132; his Astraa, 134; 
192; Nosce Teipsum, 218, 219; 
his Discovery of the State of 
Ireland, 299, 300; Epigrams of, 
326 ; popularity of, 423 

Davison, Francis, his Poetical 
Rhapsody, 192, 195 ; 373 ; his 
masque of the Gesta Grayorum 

392 
Davison, William, 192 
Day, John, 100, 188 ; his Isle of 

Gulls, and Humor Out of 

Breath, 388 
Dedekind, Friedrich, 117 
Dee, Dr. John, his Diary, 300 
Defoe, Daniel, ii6, 117 
Dekker, Thomas, on the use of 



scenery, 86; 100, 103, 105; 
pamphlets of, 117, 118; his 
conycatching tracts, 117, 329; 
The Gulls' Hornbook, 117, 118, 
328; humanity of, 118, 163; 
life of, 172, 173 ; Old Fortuna- 
tus quoted, 173, 174; The Shoe- 
makers' Holiday, 174; 175 J 
early collaboration of, 175; do- 
mestic dramas of, 176, 177; 178; 
value of the work of, 181; in 
the employ of Henslowe, 182; 
collaboration with Middleton, 
187; realism of, 190; lyrics of, 
201, 202; 233, Daniel ridiculed 
by, in Patient Grissel, 234; his 
Satirosnastix and part in the 
war of the theaters, 236, 237; 
243, 256, 257; collaboration with 
Webster, 261; 328, 329; writes 
pageants for the Lord Mayor, 
397; 399, 422 

Delone}', Thomas, 104, his prose 
tales, 105, 174, 214 

Demosthenes, 35 note 

De Serres, 285 

Desportes, 129, 130 

Devereux, Lady Penelope, Sid- 
ney's Stella, 30, 31 

Diaries and like writings, 300 

Diccon of Bedlam, see Gammer 
Gurton's Needle 

Dickenson, John, his Arisbas, 40 

Divinity, see Theological writ- 
ings and Controversy 

Dolci, 6S 

Domestic Drama, 174-181 

Donne, Henry, 358 

Donne, John, loi, possible influ- 
ence of Greville on, 125 ; his 
Corona and Holy Sonnets, 133; 
192, 202, 207, 225, 249, 272; 
a friend of Wotton, 298 ; Ser- 
mon of, quoted, 313, 314; his 
sermons, 314; the Satires of, 
319-322, 324, 359; life of, 357- 
364; his education and early 
friends, 358; his descriptive 
realism, 359, 360; secular 
lyrical poetry of, 360, 361; 
lyrical cynicism of, 360, 361; 
his romantic lovematch, 361, 
362; friendship with the Her- 
berts, 362; Biathanatos of, 363; 
religious controversy and prepa- 
ration, 363, 364; his liberali^ 



468 



INDEX 



on opinion, 364; becomes Dean 
of St. Paul's, 364; and Cowley, 
364; and the "metaphysical 
school of poetry"; 364, 365; 
salient qualities of the poetry 
of, 365-371 ; The Anatomy of 
the World, 367; his originality, 
368; his use of conceit, 368, 
369; his use of technical 
imagery, 370, 371 ; a lost ed. of 
the poetry of, 371 ; influence of, 
37i> 372; Jonson and, 371, 372; 
Herbert and, 372, 373 ; Drum- 
mond's opinion of, 374; 375; 
strictly an Elizabethan, 376; 
Izaak Walton and, 377, 424 

Douglas, Lady, 53 

Dove, John, 49 

Dowden, E, 41 

Dowland, John, the lutenlst, 197, 
198 

Drake, Sir Francis, 15, i6, 24 

Drama, before Elizabeth, 63 ; 
Elizabethan, its origin at court 
64, 66 ; classical influence on 
the, 65 ; Italian influence on, 
66; before the Armada, 66, 67; 
amateur nature of earlier, 67; 
of the boy companies, 68, 69 ; 
presentation of, at court, 76- 
78 ; popular, its origin, 80 ; pre- 
Shakespearean popular, 89, 90; 
main influences on the, 90; play- 
wrights preceding Shakespeare, 
90-100; the new romantic, 100; 
popular vernacular, 148-190; 
Shakespeare in the, 148-171 ; 
Dekker Heywood and Middle- 
ton in the, 172-190; domestic, 
174-182; Henslow's exploita- 
tion of the, 182-184; murder 
plays in the, 184, 185 ; of Lon- 
don life, 186-188 ; of romantic 
type, 188 ; the problem, 188, 
189; songs in the, 201-208; of 
humors, 230-232; war of the 
theaters, 232-237 ; personal 
rivalry in the, 232-240; Sene- 
can influence on academic, 
240; Jonson and Shakespeare in 
the, 240-242; Jonson in, 230- 
245 ; heydey of the tragic, 250- 
271 ; later Senecan influence in, 
250, 251, earliest tragedies of 
Shakespeare, 251-255; Roman 
history in the, 252-254; Cleo- 



patra in, 255; Chapman in 
tragic, 255 ; of revenge, 257- 
260; other tragic topics for, 
260; Webster in, 261-264; 
Shakespeare in the height of 
his tragic, 264-271 ; Bacon and 
the, 350, 351; at the universi- 
ties, 378-384; early college 
plays, 378, 379; royal patron- 
age of, at the universities, 378, 
379 ; nature and limitation of 
the college, 379 ; the Parnas- 
sus trilogy, 379-381; Lingua 
and other allegorical college, 
381-383; tragical, at college, 
383, 384; the pastoral, 384-392; 
the masque, 392-398; character 
of Elizabethan, 399; Fletcher 
and the heroic, 400 ; tragicomedy, 
400 ; Beaumont and Fletcher in 
the, 400-406 ; the Philaster-type 
of, 405, 406 ; the "romances" of 
Shakespeare, 407-414; Shakes- 
peare and Fletcher in the, 413- 
415; Fletcher's comedies of 
manners, 415, 416; romantic 
comedies of Fletcher, 416; 
Fletcher in tragic, 417-419; 
the new, of Fletcher, 420 

Drant, Thomas, experimenter in 
classical verse and translator of 
Horace, 26, 274; and of Homer, 
274, 275, 317 

Drayton, Michael, 7, 8 ; commends 
The Shepherds' Calendar, 49 ; 
alluded to in Colin Clout, 53 ; 
a pastoralist, 123 ; his use of 
conceit, 128, 134; his Idea's 
Mirror, 129, 130, 137, 138; his 
borrowings of the French 
lyrists, 130; 131, 134; parallels 
with Shakespeare, 138; his part 
in the play of Oldcastle, 162; 
his part in The Merry Devil of 
Edmonton, 175 ; a writer for 
Henslow, 182; alleged author of 
the words to Morley's First 
Book of Ballets, 197; 200; nar- 
rative poems of, 211, 212; his 

■ Ballad of Agincourt, 212 ; life 
of, 212, 213 ; contemporary 
repute of, 213; Polyolbion of, 
220, 221; eclogues of, 223, 224; 
Browne a disciple of, 225, 226; 
227, 278; 358, 371, 422, 423 



INDEX 



469 



Droeshout, portrait of Shake- 
speare, 100 

Drummond, William, loi, 135, 
239 ; his Notes of Conversations 
imth Jonson, 24.8, 300; 359; his 
Poems, 372; life of, 373, 374; 
his reading, 373, 374; his opin- 
ion of Sidney and Donne, 374; 
his logical poetry, 374, 375; 
later works of, 375 ; 376 

Drury, Elizabeth, celebrated by 
Donne, 366, 367 

Drury, Sir Robert, 363 

Dryden, Sir Erasmus, 47 

Dryden, John, 34, 121, 219; calls 
Jonson's latest plays "his do- 
tages," 244 ; 249 ; his portrait of 
Cleopatra, 255, 316, 318; his 
deliverance as to Donne, Cow- 
ley and "metaphysics," 364, 
365; 400; on the "gentlemen" 
of Fletcher and Shakespeare, 
420; 422 

Du Bartas, 130, translated by 
Sylvester, 285 

Du Bellay, 46, a source for Spen- 
ser, 285 

Dudley, Robert, see Earl of 
Leicester 

Dumb shows, 76, 77 

Dyer, Sir Edward, 25 

Dyneley, Rose, supposed to be 
Spenser's Rosalind, 47 

Earle, John, Characters of, 336 

Eclogues, English, 223 

Educational writings, 299 

Edward VI, King, i, 9, 10, 63, 
64, 78, 288 

Edwards, Richard, Master of the 
Chapel Royal, his dramas, 29, 
67, 68 ; his jests, 104, 194, 379 

Egerton, Sir Thomas, a friend 
of Donne, 359-360, 362 

Einstein, L., 273 note 

Elderton, William, 68 

Elegiacs, 27 

Elizabeth, Princess, Queen of 
Bohemia, 298, 350; grand 
masques of the marriage of, 

395. 4" 
Elizabeth, Queen, i, 2, 4-6, 8, 10, 
II ; welcomed with poetry at 
Kenilworth, 22, 23 ; 39 ; orders 
Spenser a pension, 52; 54; The 
Faery Queen dedicated to, 55; 
figured in the same, 59 ; 63 ; 



Gorboduc acted before, 65 ; 
character of, as an encourager 
of the drama, 67 ; 69 ; figured 
in plays of Lyly, 70-73 ; com- 
plimented in The Arraign- 
ment of Paris, 75, 76; 82, 84, 
94, 102, 103, 113; eulogized by 
Greville, 125, 304; 145, 157; 
suggests Falstaff of The 
Merry Wives, 162; 164, 168; 
proposes visiting Queen Mary 
in disguise of a page, 172 ; rep- 
resented on the stage in obit- 
uary plays, 178; 182, 193, 194, 
206, 209, 216, 219, 221; Shake- 
speare and other poets criti- 
cised for not celebrating the 
death of, 224, 225 ; 232, 255, 
272, 276 ; commands Hkrington 
to translate Orlando Furioso, 
280; the Bishops' Bible the offi- 
cial Bible of, 289; 292, Cam- 
den's Annals of, 293 ; Hay- 
ward's Annals of, 294; 297; an 
auspicious day calculated for 
the accession of, by Dr. Dee, 
300; 309; 317, 337; mistrusts 
Bacon, 339, 341, 355; para- 
phrases certain psalms, 351 ; 
356, 357; regaled with plays 
at Cambridge, 378, 379; 383, 
384; pastoral interludes before, 

385; 392, 414, 421. 425 
Ellesmere, Lord Chancellor, 359; 

Donne secretary to, 360; his 

opinion of Donne, 362 
Ellis, R. L., 343 
Elyot, Sir Thomas, 2, 299 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 305 
England's Helicon, contributors 

to, 123; 124; 191, 192 

England's Parnassus, 192 
Epic, Elizabethan poetry, 209-212 
Epigrams, and satire, 326; of Sir 

John Davies, 326 ; of Davies of 

Hereford, 327; of Wither, 

Rowlands and Harington, 327 ; 

of Jonson, 327, 328 ; in prose, 

328 
Erasmus, Desiderlus, 2, 4, 287, 

307 
Eslava, Antonio de, his Noches 

de Invierno alleged the source 

of The Tempest, 412 
Essays, of Breton, 335; of Bacon, 

346-350 



470 



INDEX 



Essex, Frances Howard, Countess 
of, 71 ; celebrated by Chapman, 
275 ; her flirtation with Somer- 
set and marriage to him, 333; 
her murder of Overbury, 334 

Essex, Robert Devereux, second 
Earl of, 15, 54, io6, 141, allu- 
sion to the popularity of, in 
Henry V, 168, 192, 223, Chap- 
man's Homer first dedicated to 
the, 276. 293 ; accompanied by 
Raleigh in the expedition 
against Cadiz, 295 ; 320, his 
friendship for Bacon, 338-340; 
Bacon of counsel against, in 
his trial for treason, 340, 341, 
350; Donne a volunteer on the 
Cadiz expedition of the, 359 

Essex, Robert Devereux, third 
Earl of, 333 

Essex, Walter Devereux, first 
Earl of, 30 

Est, Thomas, 196 

Etheridge, Sir George, 249 

Euphuism, of Lyly, 37-40; its 
nature, 37-39; vogue of, 40; 
imitations of Lyly, 40, 41 ; and 
Arcadianism, 41, 44 

Euripides, 29, 74, 250 

Evans, Henry, manager of the 
theater in Blackfriars, 68 

Fabyan, Robert, his Chronicle, 6 

Fair Em the Miller's Daughter, 
89 

Fair Maid of the Exchange, The, 
a comedy attributed to Hey- 
wood, 179 

Fairfax, Edward, translator of 
Tasso, 281, 225 

Faithful wife, the, as a theme for 
drama, 175 

Featley, Daniel, 307, 315 

Fenton, Sir Geoffrey, 22, his 
Tragical Discourses, 282; his 
translation of Guiccardini's 
Wars of Italy, 284 

Ferrant, Richard, 68 

Ferrero, F. L., 271 

Feuillerat, A., note, 77 

Field, John, theologian, 307 

Field, Nathaniel, Jonson's scholar 
in the drama, 231; his Woman 
is a Weathercock and Amends 
for Ladies, 187 

Fisher, Thomas, xoz 



Fitzgeoffrey, Charles, Latin epi- 
grams of, 327 

Fletcher, Giles, the elder, his 
Licia, 130; his conceits, 134; 
his frankness as to his inspira- 
tion, 138, 139; 221 

Fletcher, Giles, the younger, 210, 
life of, 231 ; his Christ's Vic- 
tory, 221, 222; 400 

Fletcher, John, 67, 149, 163, 176, 
181, 182, i88; as a lyrist, 206, 
207, 221, 224; his portrait of 
Cleopatra, 225; 257, 271; 355, 
386; his Faithful Shepherdess, 
388, 389, 399; life of, 400, 401; 
his relations to Beaumont and 
Massinger, 401-404; a follower 
of Middleton in comedy, 402; 
style and verse of, contrasted 
with those of Beaumont, 402- 
404; Philaster sets a new type, 
405, 406 ; The Maid's Tragedy 
and other plays of the Philaster 
type, 406 ; alleged influence of, 
on Shakespeare, 406, 407 ; sup- 
posed collaboration of, with 
Shakespeare, 413, 414; his share 
in Henry VIII; Shakespeare's 
Shreix) and The Tamer Tamed 
of, 415; The Scornful Lady and 
other comedies of manners by, 

415, 416; The Beggar's Bush, 
and other romantic comedies of, 

416, 417; in tragedy, 4I7;Bom- 
duca of, quoted, 417-419; his 
Valentintan, 419; the new dra- 
matic art of, 420; decadent 
quality in, 420; the folio edd. 
of Beaumont and, 424 

Fletcher, Joseph, 221 

Fletcher, Laurence, a member of 
Shakespeare's company, 168 

Fletcher, Phineas, probably the 
author of Britain's Ida, 218 ; 
life of, 221 ; his Purple Island, 
221, 222; his piscatory drama, 
Sicelides, 390, 400 

Fletcher, Richard, Bishop of Lon- 
don, 400 

Florio, John, his translation of 
Montaigne, 286 

Ford, Emanuel, his Parismus, 40 

Ford, John, 204, 399 

Forman, Dr. Simon, Diary of, 300 



INDEX 



471 



Fortescue, Thomas, his Forest, 
282 

Fortune playhouse, the, 183, 232 

Foxe, John, his Book of Martyrs, 
6, 14, 15, 18, 422 

Frampton, John, 284 

Francis I, King of France, 49 

Francis II, King of France, 2 

Fraunce, Abraham, a practicer of 
English hexameter verse, 26 ; 
translator of Tasso's Aminta, 
281 

Freitag, G., 268 

Fresnayne, 318 

Frobisher, Martin, 15, 24, 105 

Froissart, 9 

Fuller, Thomas, 229, 278, 310 

Furness, Horace Howard, 37 

Gager, William, Latin college 
plays of, 378, 379 

Galileo, 346 

Gamelyn, The Tale of, 386 

Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop of 
Winchester, 6 

Garnier, Robert, his Cornelia 
translated by Kyd, 93 ; influ- 
ence of, on English academic 
tragedy, 240; his Antoine trans- 
lated by Lady Pembroke, 285 

Gascoigne, George, life and liter- 
ary career of, 22, 23 ; 24, 26, 28 ; 
his tragedy Jocasta, 65, 67; 75, 
78, 105; stepfather to the poet, 
Breton, 106 ; advice as to fram- 
ing a lyric, 127; procures the 
publication of a tract of Gil- 
bert, 142; his Supposes, 154, 
155, 164; on music for lyrics, 
193 ; 213 ; his Ferdinando Jero- 
nimo, 282; his Steel Glass, 319; 
his use of pastoral figures at 
Kenil worth, 385 

Georgievitz, 295 

Gesta Grayorum of 1594, 
masques of Campion and Davi- 
son in the, 392 

Gibbons, Orlando, 198 

Gifford, Humphrey, 23 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 15, 16, 
24, 105 ; his Discourse of a New 
Passage published by Gas- 
coigne, 142; half-brother to 
Raleigh, 295 

Giles, Nathaniel, Master of the 
Chapel Royal, his illegal use of 



the royal commission to kidnap 
children for actors, 68 ; 232 

Glraldus, Cambrensls, 11 

Globe Theater, the, 81, 82; value 
of shares in, 82; 84, loi, 232, 
413; burnt, 414 

Goethe, 143 

Golding, Arthur, his translation 
of Ovid, 274 

Gongora, not responsible for the 
conceit in English poetry, 127; 
369 

Goodere, Sir Henry, a friend of 
Drayton, Donne and other 
poets, 212, 363, 364, 371 

Googe, Barnabe, 3 ; his eclogues, 
23, 49, 213 

Gosson, Stg^phen, his School of 
Abuse, 28, no; his account of a 
play on the subject of The 
Merchant of Venice, 66, 156; 
253; satirical pamphlets of, 
-3^9. 330 ; 

Gough, Henry, historian, 295 

Gower, John, 9, 20, 112, 408 

Grafton, Richard, his chronicle 
histories, 6 

Granada, Luis de, translated by 
Hopkins, 284 

Gray, Thomas, 219 

Greene, Robert, Euphulstic novels 
of, 40, 41 ; a writer for 
the stage, 81 ; his allusion to 
Shakespeare and other play- 
wrights. In A Groatsiuorth of 
Wit, 88, 149, 158, 159; his Or- 
lando Furioso, 89, 91 ; Friar 
Bacon and other dramas of, 91, 
92 ; his success in comedy ; 92 ; 
the pamphlets of, 107-110; love 
stories of, 107, 108 ; Pandosto, 
source of The Winter's Tale, 
108 ; autobiographical pam- 
phlets of, 109, no; conycatch- 
ing tracts, 109, 329; pathos of 
the ungoverned life of, no; 
abused by Harvey, m; pas- 
toral lyrics of, 124; spirit of 
Troilus and Cressida caught 
from, 167; 172, 173, 178, 
187, 188; lyrics of. In his pam- 
phlets, 201 ; 202, 224, 251, 390, 
410, 411 

Greg, W. W., 8i; 182 note 

Grenvllle, Sir Richard, 17, i8, 
295 



472 



INDEX 



Gresham, Sir Thomas, 178 
Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke, 
friendship at school with Sid- 
ney, 24; a member of the 
Areopagus, 25 ; appears with 
Sidney at tilt, 31; on Sidney's 
character, 33 ; 76, I2i ; his lyrics 
Coelica, 125, 126; 132; poetical 
Treatises, 219; influence of 
Gamier on, 240; his tragedies, 
Alaham and Mustapha, 240; 
his ideals of writing history, 
293 ; his Life of Sidney, 304, 
305 ; his qualities as an author, 

305, 376 . . , 

Griffin, Bartholomew, his Fidessa, 

131 

Grimald, Nicholas, 21 

Grimestone, Edward, various his- 
torical writings of, 285, 295 

Grim the Collier of Croydon, 89 

Grindal, Edmund, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, 49 

Grocyn, William, 287 

Grosart, A., 86 note, 105, II2, 
222, 351, 352 

Groto, Luigi, 383 

Grove, Mathew, 23 

Guarini, his Pastor Fido trans- 
lated, 281; 385, 386 

Guevara, 3, 19, 39, his Golden 
Book translated, 284 

Guiccardini, 284 

Guilpin, Edward, his Skialetheia, 
326 

Gwinne, Matthew, his tragedy on 
Nero, 253, 384 

Hake, Edward, his News out of 
Paul's Churchyard, 318 

Hakluyt, Richard, account of 
IS, 16; his Principal Naviga- 
tions and other works, 16, 17; 
his successors, 17; 18, 19, 284, 
421 

Hall, Arthur, his translation of 
the Iliad, 275, 285 

Hall, Edward, his Chronicle, 6, 

13 
Hall, Joseph, 234, the Contem- 
plations of, 314, 315; the 
Satires of, 321-326 ; life of, 
322; Milton on the "toothless 
satires" of, 322; the meter of, 
323, 324; his obscurity, 323; 
his problematic allusions, 324; 
his Mundus Alter et Idem, 332; 



his Characters, 332, 333; 335, 
422 

Hallam, Henry, 145 

Hannay, Patrick, his poem Philo- 
mela, 193 

Harbert, Sir William, his Proph- 
ecy of Cadivallader, 214 

Hardyng, John, his Chronicle, 6 

Harington, Lucy, 25 

Harington, Sir John, 59, 76, his 
translation of Orlando Furioso, 
280, 281 ; his Apology for 
Poetry, 281; his Epigrams, 327 

Harman, Thomas, his Caveat for 
Common Cursetors, 328, 329, 

331 

Harrison, William, his Descrip- 
tion of England, ii, 12, 16 

Harvey Gabriel, 23, and the Are- 
opagus club, 25, 26; the friend 
of Spenser, 46-49 ; attacks 
Greene, 11 1; and Nash, 112, 
113, 116; 126; his Four Letters, 
134; 300, 326; supposedly ridi- 
culed in Pedantius, 579 

Harvey, William, 222; his mis- 
trust of Bacon's method, 346 

Hathaway, Ann, 149 

Hathway, Richard, 162, 182 

Hatton, Sir Christopher, 339 

Hawkins, Sir John, 15, 16 

Hay, Lord, 363 

Hayward, John, 3, 6; education 
of, 293 ; his History: of Henry 
IF, and other like work, 293, 
294; his attempt to improve the 
writing of history, 204; accused 
by Bacon of plagiarism, 294 

Heisius, defines satire, 316 

Heliodorus, 274 

Heming, John, 81, a sharer with 
Shakespeare in the Globe thea- 
ter and Blackfriars, 82 ; r^i 

Henley, W. E., 49, 201 

Henry VH, 5, 13 

Henry VHI, 1, 4-6, 10, 20, 39, 63, 
78, 121, 163 ; a poet and musi- 
cian, 193; 284, 288, 357 

Henry, King, of Navarre, 134 

Henry, Prince, 275. 276, 347, 372 

Henryson, Robert, 49 

Henslowe, Philip, 100, loi, 162, 
178; and his Diary, 182-184; 
186, 202, 213, 229, 230, 251, 253, 
261, 424 

Herbert, George, a friend of 



INDEX 



473 



Donne, 362; influence of Donne 
on, 372, 373 ; Bacon dedicates 
his Psalms, to, 351 

Herbert, Edward Lord, of Cher- 
bury, 362 

Herbert, Lady Magdalen, a per- 
sonal friend of Donne, 362 

Herrick, Robert, 249, 372 

Hesiod,' translated, 274 

Hexameters in English, 26, 27, 
274 

Heyes, Thomas, 102 

Heywood, Elizabeth, 357 

Heywood, Jasper, 3, 357, 358 

Heywood, John, 3, 63, 64, 357^ 

Heywood, Thomas, chronicle 
plays of, 161, 163; in domestic 
drama, 176-182; life of, 178 
an actor for Iljnslowe, 178 
mythological plays of, 178, 240 
his dramatic glorification of the 
London 'prentice, 179 ; A Wom- 
an Killed ivit/i Kindness, 179- 
181 ; "a prose Shakespeare," 
i8i; other plays of, 181; his 
method of writing, 181, 182; 
i88, 190; lyrics in the plays of, 
207, 208 ; The Rape of Lucrece, 

.^53 
Higden, Ralph, his Polychronicon, 

5 

Higgins, John, 7 

Hilton, John, 204 

History, Elizabethan interest in, 
5-9 ; chronicles in prose, 6, 10- 
15; in verse, 6, 7; Elizabethan 
conception of, 292 ; earlier writ- 
ing of, annals, 292; Cam- 
den's idea of research in, 292 ; 
Greville and his ideals as to 
the writing of, 293 ; English, of 
Stow, Speed and Daniel, 294; 
of various nations by Grime- 
stone, 295 ; Knolles and his, of 
the Turks, 295 ; Raleigh as a 
writer of, 295, 296 ; of antiqui- 
ties, 297-299 

Hoby, Sir Thomas, translator of 
The Courtier of Castiglione 

Hblinshed, Ralph, Chronicles, 6, 
10-14; 17, 18; source of Arden, 
184; source of King Lear, 265; 
the source of Macbeth, 266; 
Stanihurst, a contributor to, 
274; 292, 409 



Holland, Philemon, his transla- 
tions, 278, 292 

Holyday, Barten, Perseus Eng- 
lished by, 317 

Homer, translated, 56, 256, 273 ; 
by Drant, 275 ; by Hall, 275, 
276 ; by Chapman, 275-278 ; the 
Iliad quoted, 276, 277 

Hooker, John, 12 

Hooker, Richard, 4, 34; life of, 
309-311; his controversy with 
Travers, 310; personality of, 
310, 311; his Ecclesiastical 
Polity, 310-313 • character of the 
prose of, 312; commonly over- 
rated, 313; quoted, 313; his 
prose contrasted with that of 
Donne, 313; 349 

Hope theater, the, 84 

Hopkins, John, 352 

Hopkins, Richard, translator of 
Granada, 294 

Horestes, the tragedy of, 71 

Horace, 26, a model for Jonson, 
246, 248 ; translated, 273 ; by 
Drant, 274, 317; 316; nature of 
the satires of, 317; imitated by 
Wyatt, 318; spirit of, in the 
satires of Donne, 320; 322, 328 

Houghton, William, 100; his 
comedy Englishmen for my 
Money, 175 ; 182 

Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 

2, 3, 4 
Howell, Thomas, 23 
Hughes, Thomas, his play of The 

Misfortunes of Arthur, 77 
Hume, Tobias, the lyrist and 

musician, 198 
Humors, see Comedy of humors 
Hunnis, William, plays of, 68, 194 
Illiteracy in Elizabeth's time, 102, 

103 
Interludes, of Heywood, 63 
Ireland, state documents concern- 
ing, by Bacon, Spenser and 

others, 299, 300 
Jacobean, press, the, 103 
Jack Drum's Entertainment, a 

play in the war of the theaters 

attributed to Marston, 235 
Jaggard, Edward, publisher of 

The Passionate Pilgrim, 144, 

198 
James I, King, of Scotland, 20 
James I, King of England, 8, his 



474 



INDEX 



Art of Poesy, 26; 82, 90, io6, 
136, 168, 207, 222, 225, 240, 
245, 278, 286; and the Author- 
ized Version of the Bible, 287, 
290, 291; 293, 294, 296-298; 
Basilikon Doron, and other 
writings of, 301 ; his opinions 
on witchcraft, education and 
tobacco, 301, 302, 305, 315, 320, 
329; and Overbury, 333, 334; 
his favors and promotions of 
Bacon, 340, 341, 355 ; and 
Donne, 364; 373; welcomed to 
Scotland by Drummond, 375; 
Lingua acted before, 382; Igno- 
ramus acted before, 383, 384; 
386, 390; progress of, to London 
characterized by pageantry, 

392, 394, 397, 399, 404, 4i7, 42i, 

422 
J. C.'s Alalia, 132 
Jerome, Saint, 290, 351 
Jessopp, A., 357, 361 
Jest-books, 104 
Jew, the, in Elizabethan drama, 

156 
Jewell, John, Bishop of Salisbury, 

309 
John, The Troublesome Reign of, 

Johnson, Richard, the musician, 
197, 203 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 10, 244; 
the "metaphysical school of 
poetry" invented by, 365 

Jones, Inigo, his services in scenic 
devices for the masque, 391 ; 
devises change of scenery for 
Tethys' Festival, 395; 397 

Jones, Robert, the musician, 198, 
203 

Jonson, Ben, 34, the first poet lau- 
reate, 52 ; applies the adjective 
"gentle" to Shakespeare, 53 ; 55, 
79; on the use of scenery, 86; 
revises The Spanish Tragedy, 
94; 96, loi ; on Southwell, 126; 
on the "requisites" of a poet, 
130; 149; Shakespeare an actor 
in plays of, 150; his opinion of 
Shakespeare's Latin, 151; 155; 
mentioned in Hensloive, 182 ; 
186, 187, 191, 195; as a lyrist, 
206, 207; 224; earlier life of, 
229, 230; Every Man in his 
Humor, 230; the comedy of 



humors of, 231; and the war of 
the theaters, 232-237; the dra- 
matic satires of, 234-237; 
attacks of, on fellow play- 
wrights, 234-236; his complai- 
sant picture of himself, 235; 
Poetaster, 236, 237; and Shake- 
speare in classic tragedy, 241 ; 
Sejanus and Catiline, 241, 242 ; 
writes Eastivard Hoe with 
Dekker and Marston, 242; Vol- 
fone of, 242, 243 ; nature of the 
comedies of, 243 ; English scene 
preferred by 243, 244; The 
Alchemist, The Silent Woman, 
and Bartholomew Fair, 243, 
244; the last comedies of, 244, 
245.; the folio of 161 6 of, 245; 
non-dramatic poetry of, 245, 
246 ; classicality of, 246 ; lyrical 
and gnomic poetry of, 246-248 ; 
opinions of, 248 ; catholicity of 
the taste of, 248, 249 ; respon- 
sible for the classic reaction, 
249 ; revises The Spanish Trag- 
edy, 258 ; in rivalry with 
Shakespeare in the tragedy of 
revenge, 258; technique of, 
268, 272, 274, 275, 278, 291, 292; 
contributes to Raleigh's History, 
296; visits Drummond in Scot- 
land, 300; 303; his Discoveries, 
304-306 ; his opinion of Bacon 
and Shakespeare, 306; 316, 
317, 324, 326; Epigrams of, 
327, 328 ; "characters" in plays 
of, 331, 332; 344; on the elo- 
quence of Bacon, 348; 349, 355, 
358; and Donne, 359, 366, 371, 
372; and Drummond, 373, 374; 
376, 377; 381; The Sad Shep- 
herd of, 385, 386, 390; and the 
masque, 391-395; his rivalry 
with Daniel, 392; invents the 
antimasque, 394 ;_ 395, 396, 397, 
399; his conviviality and Bo- 
hemianism, 401 ; and Beaumont, 
402; 403, 415; the playwright of 
theory, 420; the first folio of 
the works of, 423, 424; 425 
Josephus, translated, 273 
Jusserand, J. J., 36, 40, 115 
Juvenal, translated, 273 ; nature of 
the satires of, 317; his method 
of direct rebuke, 317; 323 
Keats, John, 62, 215 



INDEX 



475 



Kemp, William the comedian, 8i; 

taken off in The Return from 

Parnassus, 380 
King Leir, a comedy attributed 

to Lodge, 163, 265 
King's company of players, 80; 

recognized in Scotland, 168 ; 

183, 185 
Kingsley, Charles, 36 
Kinwelmarsh, Francis, 23 
Kirke, Edward, the "E. K." of 

the gloss to The Shepherds' 

Calendar, 45-48 
Kirkman, Francis, publisher on 

Hey wood, i8i 
Knolles, Richard, his History of 

the Turks, 295 
Kyd, Thomas, a schoolmate of 

Spenser's, 45; 80; a playwright 

for various companies, 81; 89; 

life of, 93 ; The Spanish Trag- 
edy and other plays of, 93-95 ; 

influence of Seneca on, 95 ; 

author of the lost Hamlet, 95 ; 

influence of, on tragedy, 100; 

attack of Greene on, in; 155, 

236, 240, 251; revival of The 

Spanish Tragedy of, 257, 258; 

translation by, of Garnier's 

Antoine, 285 ; 378, 399 
Luelia, a college comedy, 383 
Lamb, Charles, 181, 189, 208, 220, 

273 
Landor, Walter Savage, 376 
Langland, John, 3 
Languet, Hubert, 24 
Latimer, Hugh, 4 
Latin, an example to English, 8 ; 

the only language of learning, 

9 ; construction of Elizabethan 

prose, 9, lo 
Latinism and Latinists, 10, 22, 

34, 44, "6 
Learning, the New, in England, 

2, 3 
Lee, S., 30 note 
Legge, Thomas, 379 
Leicester, Earl of, Robert Dudley, 

23, 24, 47, 59, 71, 80, 153, 318; 

his company of players, 80, 153 
Leland, John, the antiquary, lo, 

221 
Lessing, 28 

Liebig, Justus von, 346 
Lilly, William, the grammarian, 

381 



Literature, of fact, the, 5-18; state 
of English in 1564, 2, 3 ; histor- 
ical, 5-15, 292-299; of travel, 
15-18, 302-304; of the coterie 
and the court, 19-45, 52-62, 63- 
79; 385-398; poetical, 29-33, 
45-62, 120-147, 191-208, 357- 
377; dramatic; 80-101, 148-190, 
250-271, 378-425 ; of contro- 
versy, 102-119; the classical 
reaction in, 229-249 ; of trans- 
lation, 272-291 ; of contempo- 
rary comment, 292-315; satiri- 
cal, 316-336 

Lithgow, William, his travels and 
sufferings from the Inquisition, 

303 

Livy, translated by Holland, 278, 
294 

Locrine, the tragedy of, attributed 
to Peele, 163 

Lodge, Thomas, his Defense of 
Poesy, 28 ; his Rosalynd, 40, 
41 ; a follower of Lyly's Eu- 
phuism, 41 ; at school with 
Spenser, 45; 49, 81; his contract 
with the drama, 90; collabora- 
tion with Greene, 91 ; alluded to 
by Greene, 92; 93, 105; pamph- 
lets of, no, in; pastoral ele- 
ment in Rosalynd of, 122 ; 123 ; 
a borrower from the French, 
130; perhaps the author of 
Mucedorus, 155, 385, 386; 
alluded to by Greene, 159; 
possible author of King heir, 
163 ; his Rosalynd, the source 
of As You Like It, 165; 
in England's Helicon, 191 ; 
his Glaucus and Sylla, 216; a 
writer of pastoral, 223, 224; 
ridiculed by Jonson on the 
stage, 234, 235; his Wounds of 
Civil War, 240, 253 ; a notori- 
ous borrower from the French 
lyrists 285 ; his Fig for Momus, 
321, 322 

Lok, Henry, his devotional son- 
nets, 132, 133 

London, Elizabethan, 83, 84; 
shops and signs of, 102; popula- 
tion of, 103 

Longfellow, H. W., 91 

Long, P. W, 72 

Lopez, Roderigo, physician to 
Queen Elizabet'n, 156 



476 



INDEX 



Lorenzo the Magnificent, 20 
Love's Labor's Won, a play of 
Shakespeare mentioned by 
Meres, 164 
Lucan, translated, 273 
Lucian, 254 
Lucilius, 347 

Lusfs Dominion, the tragedy, 100 
Lusty Jwven'tus, the morality, 3 
Lydgate, John, 3, 5, 7, "2 
Lyly, John, 4, 24; life of, 34,35, 
69, 70; Euphues and Euphuism, 
35-40; Euphuistic imitators of, 
40, 41 ; and the office of the 
revels, 69 ; Endimion, and other 
comedies of, 70-73; staging of 
plays of, 77, 78 ; as a dramatist, 
79 ; influence of, 79 ; 80, 89, 90, 
108 ; in the Marprelate Contro- 
versy, 114, 115; 121, 142, 148; 
comedies of, an example to 
Shakespeare, 153, 154, 156; 
epigrammatic nature of the 
lyrics of, 201, 203 ; lyrics vyith- 
in the comedies of, 204; 233, 
355, 369, 379, 385, .388, 399; his 
Six Court Comedies, 424 
Lynche, Thomas, his sonnets, 
Diella, 131; his conceits, 135, 

145 , 

Lyric, the, defined, 120, 121 ; of 
art, 121 ; origin of the, 121 ; 
in the miscellanies, 121 ; con- 
ventional character of the 
Elizabethan, 122; the pastoral 
period of the, 120-125 ; conceit 
in the, 127, 128 ; the sonnet, 128- 
147; of Shakespeare, 142-147; 
anthologies of the, 191, 192; 
set to music, 193-208 ; songs of 
the drama, 201-208 ; of Jonson, 
246-248 ; of Donne, Drummond 
and others, 357-377 

Macaulay, T. B., 9 

Macchiavelli, 3, 4, 284 

Machin, Levpis, 225 

Maddan, D. H., his Diary of 
Master William Silence, 152 

Madrigal, the, 27, defined, 194; 
its introduction into England, 
195, 196; writers of, 196-200 

Major, John, 11 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 5 

Manningham, John, Diary of, 300 

Mantuan, 48, 49; his eclogues a 



model for English poets, 224; 
translated by Turberville, 280 

Margaret of Navarre, 20 

Marino, not responsible for the 
conceit, 127 

Markham, Gervais, translator of 
the Satires of Ariosto, 281 ^....-i 

Marlowe, Christopher, 4, 21, 46, 
49, 74, 7,6, 80, 87, 89-93, life of, 

95, 96 ; Tamburlaijie, 96, 97^^ [ 

Faustus, 97, quoted, 98 ; oth'er 
plays, 99, 100; followers of, 100; 
168, 173 ; as^ a lyrist,; 91, 201 ; a 
translator ofT)vld, 214; Hero 
and Leander, 215, 216; his 
Dido, 240; 250; influence of, inJ 
Shakespeare in tragedy, 1251; 
his Massacre at Paris, 255 ; 26q4__, 
and Chapman, 274 ; a friend of / 
Raleigh's, 296; 355, 397, 399,j 
419, 425 

Marot, Clement, 49, pastorals of, 
employed by Spenser, 285 

Marprelate Controversy, the, 113- 
115; Puritan tracts in, 114; de- 
fenders of the church, 114, 115; 
plays in, 233; 300, 309; Bacon's 
part in, 338 

Marston, John, 192, 208 ; his Plg- 
malion's Image, 217; life of, 
233; the war of the theaters, 
233-236; his Sophonisba and 
attitude towards Jonson, 241, 
253 ; writes Eastivard Hoe with 
Jonson and Dekker, 242 ; re- 
vives the tragedy of revenge in 
Antonio and Mellida, 257, 258 ; 
ingenious horrors of, 259, 260; 
The Insatiate Countess of, 260; 
his Dutch Courtezan, 261 ; 270, 
274; his Satires, 324-326; his 
literary coxcombry, 325 ; his 
works ordered burned, 3^6 ; a 
writer of masques, 393; writes 
pageants for the Lord Mayor, 
397; brief dramatic career of, 
399; Dramatic Works of, 424 

Martial, 328 

Martin, Gregory, his part in the 
, Douay Bible, 290 

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, i, 
71, 172, 192 

Mary Tudor, Queen, i, 63, 64, 
163, 229, 288 

Masking, familiar in early times, 
76 



INDEX 



477 



Masque, the, Bacon and, 350, 351; 
defined, 301; not wholly of 
foreign origin, 392; in Eliza- 
beth's day, 392; Daniel earliest 
rival of Jonson in the Jacobean, 
392; Jonson and the, 392-394, 
397; other writers of the, 393; 
sumptuous setting of the, 393- 
395; Jonson develops the anti- 
masque, a foil for the, 395 ; 
grand masques of the wedding 
of the Princess Elizabteh, 395 ; 
great cost of the, 395 ; allegory 
in the, 396; place of the, among 
other like entertainments of the 
day, 397; effect of the, on the 
popular stage, 3Q7; later degen- 
eration of the, 398 

Massinger, Philip, 399, a collabo-^ 
rator and reviser of Fletcher, 
401, 404; 406 

Masuccio di Salerno, 282 

Matthew, Sir Toby, 350 

Matthew of Paris, 6 

Matthew of Westminster, 6 

Matthieu, 285 

Melbancke, Brian, his Philotimus, 
40 

Melville, James, the reformer, his 
Diary, 300 

Melville, Sir James, i-jz-yAuto- 
biography of, 300 

Memoirs and like works, 300 

Meres, Francis, his recognition of 
Shakespeare, 164; his mention 
of Love's Labor's Won, 166; 
his mention of Jonson, 229 

Mermaid Tavern, the, 358 

"Metaphysical School of poetry," 
the, 365, 366; origin of the 
term in Dryden, 366; miscon- 
ception of it by Johnson, 366 

Middleton, Thomas, 172, collabo- 
ration with Dekker in domestic 
drama, 176, 177; 178; life of, 
186; his comedies of London 
Life, 186, 187; romantic come- 
dies of, 188; collaboration of, 
with Rowley, 188, 189; A Fair 
Quarrel, 189, 190, 257; Women 
Beiuare Women of, 260; The 
Witch of, and Macbeth, 266; 
271 ; Micro cynicon not by, 326 ; 
writes Lord Mayors' pageants, 
397; 399! a model for Fletcher 



in comedy, 400, 402, 415, 416 

Milton, John, 9, 21, 61, i2i ; Syl- 
vester an influence on, 285; 315; 
on "toothless satire," 322; 375; 
his indebtedness to Fletcher's 
Faithful Shepherdess, 389; his 
figure and name of Comus sug- 
gested by Jonson, 393 

Minshull, Geoffrey, "characters" 
of, 336 

Mirror for Magistrates, The, 3, 
6-8, 105, 209, 2IO, 265 

Montaigne, 9 ; Florio's translation 
of, 286; Bacon derives the title 
Essays from, 347 

Montgomery, Earl of, Philip Her- 
bert, the first folio of Shakes- 
peare dedicated to the, and 
Pembroke, his brother, 141 

Montemayor, his Diana Enamo- 
rada, plot of Love's Labor's 
Lost in, 155 ; Sidney's acquaint- 
ance with, 284; 373 

More, Anne, marries Donne, 362 

More, Sir George, 362 

More, Sir Thomas, 2, 4, 9, 13; 
play on, 163 ; 307 

Morley, Thomas, the musician, 
196, 197, 203 

Moryson, Fynes, on Ireland, 299 ; 
his Itinerary, 302 

Mount] oy, Christopher, landlord 
of Shakespeare, 149 

Mucedorus, the comedy of, possi- 
bly by Lodge, 15?, 385 

Mulcaster, Richard, Master of 
the Merchant Tailors' School, 
45 ; 68 ; his educational writ- 
ings, 299. 

Munday, Anthony, his Zelauto, 
40 ; as a lyrist, 123 ; his part in 
plays of Robin Hood^ and 
Oldcastle, 161-163 ; mentioned 
in Henslowe, 182; i86; verse of, 
192; ridiculed by Jonson and 
others on the stage, 234, 235; 
his translations of romances of 
chivalry, 284, 285 ; writes Lord 
Mayors' pageants, 397; popu- 
larity of the translations of, 422 

Murder plays, the, Arden of 
Feversham, 184, 185; The 
Yorkshire Tragedy and minor, 
i8s 

Musaeus, translated, 273, by Mar- 



478 



INDEX 



lowe in Hero and Leander, 274 

Music in Elizabeth's age, 120, 
193, 194.; quality of theatrical, 
206 

Narcissus, a college interlude, 382 

Nash, Thomas, 29 ; not a Euphuist, 
41 ; 46 ; commends Spenser, 49 ; 
his part in the drama, 90; col- 
laboration of, with Marlowe, 
96, 99 ; pamphlets of, 103, 105 ; 
his controversy with Harvey, 
III, 113; his part in the Mar- 
prelate Controversy, 113-115; 
social and satirical tracts, 115; 
Jack Wilton, 115, 116; other 
tracts, 115, 116; on poets, 118, 
119, 126; procures a surrepti- 
tious publication of Astrophel 
and Stella, 129, and of Delia, 
142 ; allusion of, to Henry VI, 
158; lyrics of, 202, 203; his and 
Marlowe's Dido, 240; 303, 326, 
328 

Naunton, Sir Robert, his Frag- 
menta Regalia, 300 

Nevile, Alexander, translator of 
Seneca, 3, 23 

Newman, Cardinal, 287 

Newington-Butts, the theater at, 

Niccols, Richard, an editor of 
The Mirror for Magistrates, 7 

Nice Wanton, The, 3 

Nichols, Thomas, 284 

Niebelungen Lied, the, 278 

Noot, John van der, Spenser con- 
tributes to The Theater of 
Voluptuous Worldlings of, 46 

North, Roger Lord, 278 

North, Sir Thomas, his Dial of 
Princes, 29, 273 ; life of, 278 ; 
his translation of Plutarch, 278- 
280; the source of Shakespeare's 
Roman plays, 252, 279 ; quoted, 
279; 285, 422 

Norris, Sir Thomas, 55 

Norton, Thomas, with Sackville 
the author of Gorboduc, 65 

Novellieri, Italian, translated and 
imitated, 281, 282 

Novum Organum, the, 342, 346; 
and see Bacon 

Obscurity as a quality of poetry, 
323 

Osteler, William, an actor in 



Shakespeare's company, 82, 
262 

Ortelius, Abraham, 292 

Overbury, Sir Thomas, his defi- 
nition of the character, 331 ; 
life of, 333 ; his tragic murder, 
334; his Character of a Wife, 
and other characters, ,334-336 

Ovid, translated, by Sandys, m, 
303; by Marlowe, 214, 274; by 
Golding, 274; by Chapman, 
274, 275; 381 

Owen, John, Latin epigrams of, 

327 

Oxford, theatromania at, 382, 383 

Oxford, Earl of, 23, 69; his play- 
ers, 81 

Painter, William, 22, his Palace 
of Pleasure, 155, source of The 
Duchess of Malfi, 262; 281-282; 
a source for Timon, 407 

Palestrina, uprise of Italian music 
with, 193 

Palmer, G. H., 372 note 

Pamphlet, the, forerunner of the 
newspaper, 103 ; defined, 103, 
104; diversity of, 104 

Paradise of Dainty: Devices, The, 
121 

Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, 6 ; his part in the 
making of the Bible, 289; his 
interest in antiquities, 297; 352 

Parnassus trilogy, the. The Pil- 
grimage to Parnassus, 379; the 
two parts of The Return from 
Parnassus, 380; Shakespeare 
quoted and appraised in the, 
380, 381; Burbage and Kemp 
taken off in the, 381 

Parrot, Henry, "characters" of, 
336 

Parsons, Robert, 125 ; his Chris- 
tian Directory and other writ- 
ings, 307 

Passionate Pilgrim, The, 191 

Pastoral drama, 384; its origin in 
Italy, 385 ; elements of, in Gas- 
coigne, Sidney, Lyly and Peele, 
385 ; The Sad Shepherd and As 
You Like It, 385, 386; of regu- 
lar type, 386; Daniel's Queen's 
Arcadia, 386-388; Fletcher's 
Faithful Shepherdess, 388-390; 
other specimens of, 390, 391 

Pastoral narrative verse, 220-228, 



INDEX 



479 



inspired by Spenser, 221 ; the 
Fletchers in, 221-223 ; other 
writers of, 223-225 ; Browne 
and his group of writers of, 
225-228 

Paul's boys, 78, their playhouse, 
84; their prominence, 232 

Peele, George, his life, 73, 74; his 
dramas, 73-76 ; his Arraignment 
of Paris, 74; quoted 75, 76; 89; 
imaginative quality of, 90, 
91; Mrrey Jests of, 104; 121; 
pastoral lyrics of, 123 ; alluded 
to by Greene, 159; transfers 
Senecan tragedy in Locrine to 
the popular stage, 163 ; in 
England's Helicon, 191 ; lyrics 
in the dramas of, 201, 203 ; 223, 

251, 378, 379, 397 

Pembroke, Mary Sidney, Countess 
of, 20 ; the Arcadia dedicated 
to, 24; patronizes Breton, 106; 
translator of Garnier's Antoine, 
285 

Pembroke, William Herbert, Earl 
of, 24; his company of players, 
81; a probable patron of 
Shakespeare, 141 ; by some 
identified with the "W. H." of 
the dedication of Shakespeare's 
Sonnets, 142, 144 

Penniman, J. H., 234 

Penry, John, antimartinist execu- 
ted, 114 

Percy, William, minor sonneteer 
and playwright, 126, 131 

Persius, Satires of, Englished by 
Holyday, 317; his method of 
direct rebuke, 317; 322 

Petrarch, the sonnets of, imitated 
by Wyatt, 20; by Sidney, 30- 
32; 46; the conceit in English 
developed under the influence 
of, 127 ; universal imitation of, 
130, 131, 134; Spenser influ- 
enced by, 140; 368; Drummond 
influenced by, 374, 375 

Pettie, George, his Palace of 
Pleasure, 39, 40, 282 

Pico, della Mirandola, 20 

Pindar, 248 

Phaer, Thomas, his translation of 
the Mneid, 3, iii 

Philaster group, the, of plays, 405, 
406 

Philip II, King, i, 19, 70 



Philips, Augustine, 81 

Phoenix' Nest, The, 191 

Plato, 38, 331, 378 

Plautus, a model for early comedy, 
64, 65 ; influence of, 90, 201, 
on Shakespeare, 154, 155; on 
Jonson, 231; translated, 273 

Play, acting of an Elizabethan, at 
court, 76-78 ; at the university, 
78 ; in the city, 87 ; cost of a 
new, 183 

Players, classes of Elizabethan, 
67 ; choirboys as, 68, 69 ; stroll- 
ing, and mountebanks, 80; early 
companies of professional, 80, 
81; boy, for women's parts, 87; 
.importance and success of, 87- 
89 ; attacks upon, 88 ; extem- 
poral wit of, 89; success of, 
100, loi, 183; and see under 
Allej^n and Burbage 

Playhouse, construction of the 
Elizabethan, 82-85; the inn- 
yard, the original of the, 82, 
83; stage of the, 85: balcony of 
the, 85; behavior of gallants at 
the, 87 

Playwrights, varieties of, 64; 
choirmasters as, 67, 68 ; popular 
professional and actor, 89; pre- 
Shakespearean group of, 90-101 

Pleiade, the, 24, 30 

Pliny, translated by Holland, 278 

Plutarch, a source of The Mid- 
summer-Night's Dream, 157; 
Shakespeare's general source for 
Roman history, 254; 273; trans- 
lated by Holland, 278 ; by 
North, 280 

Poel, W., 156 note 

Poetomachia, see War of the 
Theaters 

Poliziano, 20 

Pontoux, Claude de, 130 

Pope, Alexander, 249 

Pope, Thomas, a fellow actor of 
Shakespeare, 81 

Porter, Henry, his comedy T'wo 
Angry Women of Abington, 

Portes, Phillipe des, 285 
Porta, Giovanni, della, 383 
Porto, Luigi da, 282 
Poseidippus, an epigram of, para- 
phrased by Bacon, 352 
Poulter's measure, 21 



48o 



INDEX 



Prayer Book, the English, 306 

Preston, Thomas, 29, 46, his 
Cambyses, 68; 379 

Priscian, 381 

Problem play, the Elizabethan, 
189 

Properties on the Elizabethan 
stage, 85-87 

Prose, English, early disrepute of, 
8, 9 ; Ascham on, 8, 9 ; fit for 
history, 8, 9; historical, 8-15, 
292-296; of travel, 15-18, 302- 
304; in the leading-strings of 
Latin, 9, 10; the new cultivated, 
34-44; Euphuism, 37-40; Arca- 
dianism, 43 ; the pamphlet and, 
of controversy, 8o-ioi, 300-302, 
306-315; translation in, 278- 
280, 281-284, 286-291 ; miscel- 
laneous, 296-302 ; satirical, 328- 
336; Bacon and the, essay, 
346-350 

Prynne, William, 330 

Psalms, universally translated, 

351, 352 
Pulci, 20 

Pulpiters, minor, 315 
Purcell, Henry, 204 
Purchase, Samuel, continuator of 

Hakluyt, 17, 303 
Puritan idea, the, 308, 309 
Pythagoras, 37 
Puttenham, George, his Art of 

English Poesy, 27, 29 ; his Par- 

theniads in praise of Queen 

Elizabeth, 134 
Quarles, Francis, 286 
Queen Hester, the play of, 71 
Queen's players, the, 81, 88, 153, 

183 

Queen's Revels, Children of the, 82 

Quintilian, 35 note, 248 

Rabelais, 9 

Rainolds, John, 307, his contro- 
versial writings, 308 ; his Over- 
throvj of Stage Plays, 326, 329 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, his report of 
The Last Fight of the Revenge, 
17, 18 ; with Spenser in Ireland, 
51; mentioned in Colin Clout, 
52 ; Spenser's letter to, as to 
The Faery Queen, 56; a per- 
sonal friend of Marlowe, 96 ; 
lyrical poetry of, I36, 137; 2344^ 
149, 234; life of, 295, 296; his 
History of the JVorld, 295 ; his 



expeditions, 296; varied inter- 
ests, 296 ; his poetry, 296 ; as- 
sisted by Jonson and other 
scholars in his History, 296 ; 
Bacon conducts the trial of, for 
high treason, 340, 341 ; 349, 421, 
422 
Raleigh, W., 152 
Randolph, Thomas, 382, 386 
Rankins, William, his satires, 326, 

329 
Regnier, 318 
Renaissance, In England and 

Italy, 3, 4; conception of a gen- 
tleman, 19, 20 
Respublica, the morality, 63 
Return from Parnassus, The, 

allusion in, to the war of the 

theaters, 238 
Reynolds, John, 135 
Rich, Lady, see Lady Penelope 

Devereux 
Rich, Lord, 30 
Richard II, an anonymous play 

on, see Thomas of Woodstock 
Richard III, King, 13 
Riche, Barnabe, his Don Sim- 

onides, 40; his Fareivell to the 

Military Profession, 282 
Rochester, Viscount, see Carr, Sir 

Robert 
Roe, Sir John, 328 
Rogers, John, revision of the 

Bible, 288, 289 
Rogers, Thomas, obituary poems 

of, 133, 134 

"Romances" the, of Shakespeare, 
407-413 ; their epic quality and 
contrast with the Philaster type, 
407 

Ronsard, 30, 31, 130, 285 

Rose theater, the, 81, 84, 183 

Rossiter, Philip, 198 

Rowlands, Samuel, 103 ; paraph- 
lets of, 107, 327, 329 

Rowley, Samuel, his play on 
Henry VIII, 163, 414 

Rowley, William, his Shoemaker 
a Gentleman, 105 ; 188 writes 
Fortunes by Land and Sea with 
Heywood, 181 ; his collabora- 
tion with Middleton in The 
Changeling and other plays, 
186, 188-190; an actor, 188; A 
Fair Quarrel of Middleton and, 
189, 190; 257, 408 



INDEX 



481 



Ruggle, George, his If[noramus, 
acted before King James, 383, 
384 

Ruskin, John, 270 

Rutland, Earl of, Francis Man- 
ners, sixth, a patron of Shake- 
speare, loi, 141 

Sabbie, Francis, his Pan's Pipe, 
223,_ 224 

Sackville, Thomas, a contributor 
to The Mirror for Magistrates, 
7; perhaps alluded to in Colin 
Clout, 53 ; one of the authors of 
Gorboduc, 6$, 67, 240 

Sallust, 3 

Sampson, M. W., 262 note 

Sandys, George, translator of 
Ovid, paraphraser of the Bible 
and traveller, iii, 249, 303, 
304; his travels and credulity, 
304 

Sannazaro, 390 

Sapphics, 27 

Satire, in the drama, 233-238; de- 
fined, 316, 318; irregular and 
formal, 316; origin of formal, 
in Elizabeth's time, 317; earlier, 
317; Roman writers of, 317; 
influence of French, 318; of 
Wyatt and Surrey, 318; of 
Hake and Gascoigne, 318, 319; 
of Donne, 319, 320; of Lodge, 
321, 322; of Hall, 322-324; of 
Marston, 324, 325 ; summary of 
Elizabethan, 325, 326 ; minor 
irregular, 326 ; order to sup- 
press, 326; and Epigram, 326; 
in prose, 328-331 

Scenery on the Elizabethan stage, 
85-87 

Schick, J., 93 

Scoggin, Henry, 104 

Scoloker, Anthony, 135 

Scott, Miss M. A., 273 note 

Scott, Reginald, his Discovery of 
IVitchcraft, 301, 302 

Scott, Sir Walter, 37, 412 

Selden, John, contributes notes to 
Drayton's Polyolbion, 221 ; 249 
his History of Tithes and other 
works, 297, 298 

Seneca, 3, 23, a model for early 
tragedy, 65, 74; 90, 95, 100; in- 
fluence of, on academic tragedj^, 
240; on the popular stage, 240, 



250, 251; translated, 273, 274; 
his epistles described as "essays" 
by Bacon, 347; 358 
Sestina, the, 27 
Seve, Maurice, 129 
Shakespeare, Edmund, 150 
Shakespeare, Hamnet, 150 
Shakespeare, John, 102, 150 
Shakespeare, Judith, 102 
Shakespeare, Susanna, 1^0 
Shakespeare, William, literature 
at the birth of, 1-4; Holinshed 
a source for, 10, 13, 14: 16, 21, 
28, 34, 40; his use of language, 
48; 51; did Spenser know, 53; 
55 ; not the originator of Eliza- 
bethan drama, 66 ; a profes- 
sional actor, 67 ; satirizes Cam- 
byses, 68 ; 69, 76, 79 ; the com- 
pany of, 80, 81; interests of, in 
the Globe and Blackfriars, 81, 
82 ; 84-88 ; the inventor of no 
new kind of drama, 89 ; 90-92, 
94, 96, 99, 100; designs an im- 
pressa, loi ; 103, 104, 108, no, 
117; lyrics of, incidental, 123; 
a poem of Barnfield attributed 
to, 124; 129, 131; not a concet- 
tist, 134; 137; Drayton and, 
138; patrons of, 141; imitative 
in earlier work, 141, 142; the 
Sonnets of, 142-147, (and see 
Sonnets) ; biographical material 
concerning, 148, 149 ; facts of 
the life of, 149, 150; education 
and learning of, 150, 151 ; avo- 
cations of, 151, 152; and nature, 
152; in London, 153; tutors of, 
in the drama, 153 ; chronology 
of the works of, 153, 154; influ- 
ence of Lyly on, 154; experi- 
mental comedies, 154, 155; The 
Tivo Gentlemen of Verona, 
I55>. iS<5; The Merchant of 
Venice, 156; A Midsummer- 
Nighfs Dream, 157; apprentice- 
ship of, in the chronicle play, 

157, 158; the Henry VI trilogy, 

158, 159; Greene's allusion to, 
159; King John, and Richard 
HI, 159, 160; Richard H, 160, 
161 ; Marlowe and, 161 ; height 
of, in chronicle history in Henty 
IV and Henry V, i6i, 162; 
Falstaff the most popular char- 
acter of, 162; Henry VIII, 162; 



482 



INDEX 



Meres' allusion to, 164; height 
of, in comedy, 164-167; Much 
Ado, 164; As You Like It, 165; 
Tnuelfth Night, All's JVell, and 
Measure for Measure, 165-167; 
the problem of Troilus, 167; 
Essex and, 168; the company of, 
in Scotland, 168; development 
of the genius of, 168-171; 
changes in the blank- verse of, 
169; growth in the style and 
diction of, 171; 175, 178, 182; 
thrift in the management of the 
company of, 183; Arden as- 
cribed to, 184, 185; 189; son- 
nets of, in The Passionate Pil- 
grim, 191, 196; 197; songs of, 
203, 204; metrical felicity of, 
205 ; folk-poetry in the songs 
of, 206; 210, 213; narrative 
poems of, 216, 217, 222, 223; 
arraigned for not celebrating 
the death of Elizabeth, 224, 
225 ; 229 ; acts in Every Man 
in His Humor, 230; 231, 232; 
the War of the Theaters and, 
238-240; and Jonson in tragedy 
on Roman history, 241, 242; 
and Jonson contrasted, 243 ; 244, 
250; influences of Kyd and 
Marlowe on, in tragedy, 251, 
252; Titus Andronicus, 251, 
252; Romeo and Juliet, 252; 
Julius Casar, 252, 253 ; a leader 
in Roman tragedies, 253 ; 
Antony and Cleopatra, Corio- 
lanus, Timon and Pericles, 254, 
255; his treatment of mobs, 
254; the Cleopatra of, and of 
others, 255; 256; rewrites Kyd's 
Hamlet to rival Jonson's addi- 
tions to The Spariisk Tragedy, 
258; Hamlet of, 258, 259; 
transcendence of the ghosts of, 
260; Othello, 264, 265; lago 
and other villains, 265 ; King 
Lear, 265, 266 ; Macbeth, 266 ; 
the prodigy of the tragic art of, 
266, 267; development in the 
technique of the art of,^ 267- 
269; tempo in the tragedies of, 
268, 269 ; changing points of the 
view of life by, 269; morals 
and manners in, 270; ethical 
certainty of touch of, 270; atti- 
tude of, towards women, 270, 



271 ; 272, 273, 275, 278 ; his use 
of North's Plutarch as a source, 
279, 280; 281; fidelity of, in the 
use of material, 282-284; 286, 
291; 293; and shorthand, 299; 
300, 303, 305, 313, 315, 317; 
Marston parodies, 325 ; 327, 
337; the verse of Bacon con- 
trasted with the poetry of, 
3S3> 354; 2nd Shakespeare con- 
trasted, 354-356; 358, 360, 371, 
374, 376, 378 ; academic esti- 
mate of, 380; 381, 382, 386, 399, 
401 ; alleged influence of 
Fletcher on, 406, 407; the dra- 
matic romances of, 407; charac- 
teristics of these plays of, 407; 
Pericles, 407-409 ; Cymbeline, 
410; the late art of, not deca- 
dent, 410; The Winter's Tale, 
410, 411; The Tempest, 411, 
413 ; alleged Spanish source of 
the last, 412; late retirement of, 
from London, 413; collabora- 
tion of Fletcher with, 413, 414; 
The T1U0 Noble Kinsmen and 
Henry FHI, 414; 415, 417, 420; 
literature at the death of, 421- 
425 ; contemporary popularity 
of the works of, 424 ; thorough 
appreciation of, by his own 
time, 425 

Shaw, Bernard, 259, 271 

Sheffield, Countess of, 71 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 41, 62 

Shelton, Thomas, his translation 
of Don Quixote, 285 

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 231 

Shirley, James, his Narcissus, 
218 ; his revision of Chapman's 
Chabot. 256; 397, 399, 425 

Shrew, the, as a theme fo"- com- 
edy, 175, 176 

Sibbes, Richard, 315 

Sidney, Sir Henry, 23 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 4, 5 ; books 
dedicated to, 19; life of, 23, 24; 
his personal character and ap- 
preciation by his contempo- 
raries, 24; h!s writings the lit- 
erature of a coterie, 24, 25 ; and 
the Areopagus, 25, 26 ; his ex- 
periments in Italian and classi- 
cal versification, 27 ; his De- 
fense of Poesy, 28, 29; his dis- 
content with the literature of 



INDEX 



483 



his age, 29; his criticism of 
contemporary drama, 29 ; of 
alliteration, 29; his lofty ideals, 
29; the poetry of, 29-33; 
Astrophel and Stella, 29-32; 
biographical import of, 30, 31; 
Petrarchan inspiration in, 30; 
French influences on, 31; poe- 
try of the Arcadia, 32; popu- 
larization of the conceit by, 32, 
33; services of, to literature, 
33; the Arcadia of, 42-44; 
prose style of, 43, 44; The 
Shepherds' Calendar dedicated 
to, 45; and Spenser, 47-49; 51; 
alluded to in Colin Clout, 52, 
53; 62, 76, 101, 121, 123, 125, 
126, 127, his use of conceit, 128, 
129, 131, 134, 137; genuine na- 
ture of, 141, 149, 155, 169, 191, 
194, 219 ; empirical classicism 
of, 246; source of the underplot 
of King Lear in the Arcadia, 
265 ; 281 ; his interest in Span- 
ish, 284; 299, 301; Greville's 
Life of, 304; 349, 351, 368, 369; 
an example to Drummond, 374, 
375; 376; his Lady of May, 
385; 388, 422 
Simier, M. de, 71 
Skelton, John, 46, 104, 317 
Smith, Captain John, 421 
Smith, Henry, "pulpiter," 315 
Smith, William, sonneteer, 131 
Socrates, 37 
Somerset, Earl of, see Carr, Sir 

Robert 
Song-books, Elizabethan, 194-201 ; 
popularity of, 196, writers of, 
1.96-200; relation of words to 
music in the, 197 
Songs of the drama, early, 201 ; 
of the predecessors of Shake- 
speare, 201 ; of Dekker, 202, 
203; of Shakespeare, 203-206; of 
Fletcher, Jonson and other play- 
wrights, 206-208 
Sonnet, introduced by Wyatt, 21 ; 
decade of the, 128 ; equally 
indebted to France and Italy, 
129 ; Astrophel and Stella, 129 ; 
other earlier sequences, 129; 
French influence on the, 129, 
130; borrowing not plagiarism, 
130; height of the fashion of 
the, 130, 131; form of the, 131; 



varieties of the, 131, 132; the 
devotional, 132, 133 ; as an oc- 
casional poem, 133, 134; con- 
ceit in the. 134.; after-his- 
tory of the, 135; the five great 
sequences of the, 137; Idea, 137, 
138; Amoretti, 139-141; the 
Sonnets of Shakespeare, 141- 
146, their imitative nature, 142 ; 
difficulties about, 142 ; publica- 
tion and dedication of, 142, 143 ; 
story of, 144; the "other poet," 
144; Southampton and, 144, 
145 ; autobiographical interpre- 
tation of, 145 ; poetic quality 
of, 14s, 146 

Sophocles, 29, 250, 267, 271 

Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, 
third Earl of, a patron of 
Shakespeare, 141 ; and Shake- 
speare's sonnets, 143, 144; Venus 
and Adonis and Lucrece dedi- 
cated to the, 149 ; an adherent 
of Essex, 192; 2i6; an enemy of 
Bacon, 341 

Southey, Robert, 315 

Southwell, Robert, 125 ; his devo- 
tional poetry, 125, 126 ; a con- 
cettist, 128; 193, 213, 249 

Spagnuoli, Battista, see Mantuan 

Spanish influence, supposed in 
Philaster, 406; on English 
drama, 416, 417 

Spanish Moor's Tragedy, The, 
100 

Spedding, J., 294, 343, 346, 352, 

355 

Speed, John, continuator of Stow, 
294; his History of England, 
294, 297 

Spencer, Gabriel, actor, killed in 
duel by Jonson, 229 

Spenser, Edmund, 19, 23 ; his poe- 
try that of the coterie, 24; and 
the Areopagus, 25, 26, 28 ; life 
of, 45-48; 50, 51, S3, 55, 56; 
early translations, 46; and the 
Areopagus, 46 ; lost works of, 
47; The Shepherds' Calendar, 
48-50; in Ireland, 50-52, 54, 55: 
not poet laureate, 52 ; and 
Shakespeare, 52, 53; Colin 
Clout, 52, 53 ; The Faery 
Queen, 56-62 ; nature of the 
genuis of, 61, 62 ; 69, 80, 95 ; 104, 
iii; Nash on 112; i2i ; songs of 



484 



INDEX 



The Calendar, 122; limitations 
of, as a lyrist, 123, 125, 208 ; 
the Amoretti of, 130, 131, 139- 
141; occasional sonnets of, 134; 
169; in England's Helicon, 191, 
2IO, 213 ; contrasted with Mar- 
lowe, 214; influence of, 221, 
222, 224, 226, 227 ; stanza of, 
disliked by Jonson, 248 ; 249, 
278, 280, 285, 286, 291 : friend- 
ship for Raleigh, 296 ; Vieiu of 
the State of Ireland, 299, 300, 
312; his Mother Hubberd's Tale, 
319 ; 323, 324, 349, 355, 376, 378 ; 
the most popular poet of the 
age, 422; the first folio of, 423 

Spenserian stanza, the, 59-61 

Stafford, Sir Thomas, on Ireland, 
299 

Staging, of, a play at court, 76- 
78 ; at the university, 78 ; at a 
popular playhouse, 85-88; of a 
masque, 391, 394 

Stanihurst, Richard, contributor 
to Holinshed's Chronicle, 11; 
his translation of the JEneid 
into hexameters, 26, 274; 
Nash's ridicule of, iit, 112 

Stapleton, Thomas, controversial 
writings of, 307 

Stationers' company, the, 114 

Stenography or "charactery" in- 
vented by Bright, 299 

Sternhold, Thomas, translator of 
the Psalms, 352 

Stevenson, William, author of 
Gammer Gurton's Needle, 64; 
bacchanal song in, 201 

Still, John Bishop, alleged author 
of Gammer Gurton's Needle, 
46, 64 

Stow, John, his Chronicles, 12, 13, 
292, 294; his Survey of Lon- 
don, 297, 298 

St. Paul's boys, 67, 84, 232 

Strange, Lord, his players, 80, 81, 
183 

Stuart, Lady Arabella, 296 

Stubbes, Philip, his Anatomy of 
Abuse, 330, 331 

Suarez, 312 

Suetonius, translated, 273 ; by 
Holland. 278, 383 

Surrey, Earl of, Henry Howard, 
20, 21, 22, 29, n6, 121 ; his 



translation of the Mneid, 274; 
his Satire against the Citizens 
of London, 318 

Sussex players, the Earl of, 81, 
183 

Swan theater, the, 183 

Swetnam, Joseph, his attack on 
women, 329; Siuetnam the 
Woman Hater, 330 

Swinburne, A. C, 184, 354 

Sylvester, Joshua, his sonnets to 
Henry of Navarre, 134; his 
translation of Du Bartas, 192, 
285, 286 

Tacitus, 241 ; translated, 273 ; 294, 
348, 383 

Taming of a Shreia, The, a 
source of Shakespeare's Taming 
of the Shreiv, 164, 165 

Tarlton, Richard, 74, 88^ his 
Famous Victories of Henry V, 
89 ; 90, 104 

Tarviso, 195 

Tasso, inspires Spenser, 48, 130; 
56, 225 ; translated by Haring- 
ton, 380; by Carew, 281; by 
Fraunce, 281 ; his Aminta trans- 
lated and imitated, 385 

Taverner, Richard, 288 

Taylor, John, the "water poet," 
68, 214 

Tennyson, 62 

Terence, 3, translated, 273, 378 

Theater, the, in Shoreditch, 81, 
83, lOI 

Theobald, Lewis, his publication 
of The Double Falsehood as a 
play of Shakespeare's, 413, 414 

Theocritus, translated, 273, 390 

Theological writines, 306 ; their 
contemporaneousness, 306, 307 

Theophrastus, Casaubon's Latin 
translation of the Characters of, 
inspires the "Character" in 
English literature, 331 

Thersites, the interlude of, 3 

Thomas, William, 3, 384 

Thomas of Walsingham, 6 

Thomas of Woodstock, the trag- 
edy of, 163 

Thorndike, A. H., on the influ- 
ence of Fletcher on Shakespeare, 
406, 407 

Thracian Wonder, The, 89, 178 

Thucydides, 294 

Tibullus, 200 



INDEX 



485 



Titus and Gisippus. the play of, 
3 

Tofte, Robert, his Alba, 132; his 
conceits; his translation of 
Orlando Inamorata, 281 

Tomkins, Thonnias, his Lingua, 
281, 382 

Tom Tyler and his Wife, 89, 90 

Tottel's Miscellany, 2, 121 

Tourneur, Cyril, life of, 259 ; his 
Atheist's and Revenger's Trag- 
edy, 259, 260; his tragic inten- 
sity, 260; 270, 399 

Tragicomedy, defined, 4.00; of 
Philaster type, 405, 406 ; the 
"romances" of Shakespeare and, 
406, 407, 414; of Fletcher, 416, 

417 
Tragedy, first regular, 65 ; of the 
choirmasters, 67, 68 ; Peele in, 
74; presentation of early, at 
court, 77 ; at the university, 78 ; 
early historical and other, 89 ; 
Greene in, 91; Kyd in, 93-95; 
Marlowe in, 95-100; earliest, 
of Shakespeare, 153, 154, 251, 
252; Heywood in, 179, 180; the 
murder plays, 184, 185; aca- 
demic Senecan, of Daniel, Gre- 
ville and Alexander, 240; Jon- 
son in classical, 241 ; variety of 
Elizabethan, 250; Shakespeare 
and others in popular classical, 
252-255 ; on contemporary his- 
tory by Chapman and others, 
255-257; Marston, Shakespeare, 
Chettle and Tourneur in the, 
of revenge, 257-260; of per- 
verted womanhood of Middle- 
ton, Marston and Webster, 260, 
261; Webster in, 261-264; 
Shakespeare at his height in, 
264-266 ; the prodigy of Shake- 
speare's art in, 266, 267; the 
technique and realism of 
Shakespeare in Elizabethan, its 
range and variety, 250; Sene- 
can influence on, 250, 251 ; 
Shakespeare in, 251-255; Chap- 
man in, 255-257; of revenge, 
257-260; Marston in, 257, 260, 
261; Chettle in, 259; other 
themes of, 260; Webster in, 261- 
264; later, of Shakespeare, 264- 
268 ; technique of, 268 ; realistic 
quality of, 269 ; morals and 



manners in, 270; height of, in 
Shakespeare and Webster, 271 ; 
qualities of Elizabethan, 269- 
270; Senecan tragedy at the 
universities, 378, 383 ; Beau- 
mont and Fletcher in, 406, 417, 
419 

Translation, Elizabeth's the age 
of, 272; commemoration of 
books of, 272, 273 ; from the 
Italian, 272, 280-284; from the 
Spanish, 273, 284, 285 ; from 
the French, 273, 285, 286; from 
the Dutch and Flemish, 273 ; 
from the classics, 273-280; of 
the Bible, 287-291 

Travel, books of, 302-304; by 
Moryson, 302; by' Coryate, 
Sandys and Lithgow, 302, 303 

Travers, Walter, 310 

Turberville, George, 49, 121 ; 
translator of Mantuan, 280; 
Tragical Tales of, 282 

Tusser, Thomas, his Hundreth 
Good Points of Husbandry, 3 

Twine, Lawrence, 408 

Types in the dramas of Fletcher, 
405, 406 _ _ 

Tyndale, William, his one idea 
the translation of the Bible, 287 ; 
fixes the style of the Bible, 287 ; 
his version employed by later 
revisers, 288 ; his expurgation 
of ecclesiastical terms, 290; his 
Practices of Prelates, 307 

Tyrtamus, of Lesbos, see Theo- 
phratus 

Udall, John, his Diotrephes, 114 

Udall, Nicholas, author of Ralph 
Roister Doister, 3, 64; songs of, 
201 

Underbill, J. G., 273 note 

Upham, A. H., 273, note 

Uter Pendragon, source of Row- 
ley's Birth of Merlin, a play, 
188 

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 249 

Vega, Lope de, 417 

Vergil, 3, 56, 122, 236, translated, 

273 . . 

Verse, foreign, in English, 21, 26, 
27; classic and English, con- 
trasted, 27 
Vives, Lodovico, at Oxford, 284 
Vowell, see Hooker, John 



486 



INDEX 



Wager, William, Latin play- 
wright, 14 

Wallace, C. W., 69, 79, 81, 82, 
149, 15a 

Walsinghara, Sir Thomas, 96, 223 

Walton, Izaak, 106, 124, 132, 298, 
310-312, 344, 364. 377 

Warham, Archbishop, 287 

War of the theaters, 232-240; 
Jonson in the, 233-237; Mars- 
ton in the, 233, 235; Dekker's 
part in the, 236; Shakespeare 
and the, 238-240 

Warner, William, 8 ; his Pan his 
Syrinx, 40; his translation of 
the Mencechmi, 154; his Al- 
bion's England, 213, 214; 224; 
his popularity, 423 

Warning for Fair Women, A 
anonymous murder play, 185 

Wars of Cyrus, The, a conquer- 
or play, loo, 240 

Watson, Thomas, 121 ; lyrics and 
translations of, 126, 127; avows 
his sources, 130; his Madrigals, 
196; 223 

Webbe, William, his Discourse of 
English Poetry, 26; appreciates 
Spenser, 45, 49 

Webster, John, 90, 149, 186, 187; 
lyric quality of, 208; 250, 260; 
life of, 261 ; his comedies with 
Dekker, 261; Appius and Vir- 
ginia, 261; The White Devil, 
261, 262; The Duchess of Malfi, 
262-264; qualities of the tragic 
art of, 262, 263 ; his intense 
dramatic moments, 264; his 
characters, 265 ; his excess of 
horror, 270; height of tragedy 
in Shakespeare and, 271 ; 399 

Weelkes, Thomas, song writer, 
198, 204 

Weever, John, his Epigrams, 
326 

Weier, J., 301 

Wescott, Sebastian, 68 

Whetstone, George, 23, 29; his 
Promos and Cassandra, 66, 90, 
155, 167; his Rock of Regard, 
282; his Heptameron, 282 

Whitefriars, the theater in, 84 



Whitehorne, Peter, translator of 
Macchiavelli's Art of War, 284 

Whitgift, John, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, 113, 307, 310 

Whittingham, William, translator 
of the Bible, 289 

Wilbye, John, song- writer, 197 

Wilkins, George, his Miseries of 
Enforced Marriage, 185 ; 188 ; 
his novel of Pericles, 408 

William the Silent, 24 

Willobie, Henry, his A visa, 132 

Wilmot, Robert, his Tancred and 
Gismunda, 66 

Wilson, John, composer of melo- 
dies for songs of Shakespeare, 
203 

Wilson, Robert, the elder, a fore- 
runner of Shakespeare in the 
popular drama, 74; mentioned 
by Greene, 88 ; 90, 91 ; his 
Three Ladies of. London, 153, 
156 

Wilson, Robert, the younger, 162, 
182 

Wilton, Lord Grey de, 22, 50 

Wily Beguiled, the comedy of, 175 

Witchcraft, Scott's Discovery of, 
301, 302 ; King James on, 301 

Wither, George, his Fidelia, 135; 
136; 223, 226, 286; his Abuses 
Whipt and Stript, 327; a Pu- 
ritan satirist, 330; 358, 422 

Wolfe, Reginald, his plan for a 
universal history, 10, 11 

Wooley, Sir Francis, 362 

Wordsworth, William, 225 

Wotton, Henry, his Courtly Con- 
troversy, 282 

Wotton, Sir Henry, 192, his pro- 
jected works and slender 
achievement, 298 ; his friend- 
ship with Donne, 358, 377 

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 2, 4, 20-22, 
24, 63, 131, 128, 131, 318 

Wyclif, John, 287 

Xenophon, translated by Holland, 
278 

Xenophon of Ephesus, 283 

Yonge, Nicholas, introduces the 
madrigal, 195-196 



